Eric Alterman, whom Your Humble Blogger finds consistently interesting and provocative, has a particularly interesting entry today about John Kerry. I think it’s worth reading, despite my current feeling that Sen. Kerry has no more chance of being the nominee of our party in 2004 than I do.
Speaking of which, it looks to me that Dr. Dean is looking like an old-fashioned front-runner these days. In fact, I think he’s got the nomination sewn up, unless ...
- He fucks up. Not very likely, as he’s weathered the Confederate flag thing, and the deferral thing, and the secret papers thing without fucking up enough to lose front-runner status, but always possible. Buggering Saddam Hussein on the O’Reilly Factor might do it. Not likely, but never rule out catastrophe.
- The line-up changes. In the next two or three weeks, if Sen. Kerry, Rep. Gephardt, and either Gen. Clark or Sen. Edwards all throw in the towel, forming an anybody-but-Dean campaign, it might not be too late. After Iowa and New Hamphire, it will be to late for this scenario.
- The regional thing really does break down, and the South goes for a Southerner and the Midwest for a Midwesterner, and Dr. Dean takes only the North and the West, and we go into the Fleet Center without a nominee. Really unlikely, but then we haven’t been quite this polarized in a while; the South may just reject any non-Southerner. Zogby’s latest South Carolina poll shows 24% for New Englanders, only 16% for the Southerners, plus another 10% for Midwesterners. On the other hand, I don’t trust Zogby.
- Everything changes. Again. Some Big Event could make everybody look at the candidates again, and that’s always bad for a front-runner, particularly one without much foreign-policy experience (if the Big Event is of that ilk).
All of that said, I think that Dr. Dean will be the candidate. How do I feel about that? Well, not great, but not worse than I felt when I got that feeling about Gov. Clinton (as he then was) in 1992.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.