{"id":1596,"date":"2003-12-05T19:49:13","date_gmt":"2003-12-06T00:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/12\/05\/1596.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:30","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:30","slug":"kerry-and-dean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/12\/05\/kerry-and-dean\/","title":{"rendered":"Kerry, and Dean"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Eric Alterman, whom Your Humble Blogger finds consistently interesting and provocative, has a particularly interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.com\/news\/752664.asp?0cb=-11778208\">entry<\/a> today about John Kerry. I think it&#8217;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.\n\n<p>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&#8217;s got the nomination sewn up, unless ...\n\n<ul><li>He fucks up. Not very likely, as he&#8217;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&#8217;Reilly Factor might do it. Not likely, but never rule out catastrophe.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;t been quite this polarized in a while; the South may just reject any non-Southerner. Zogby&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zogby.com\/news\/ReadNews.dbm?ID=764\">latest South Carolina poll<\/a> shows 24% for New Englanders, only 16% for the Southerners, plus another 10% for Midwesterners. On the other hand, I don&#8217;t trust Zogby.<\/li>\n<li>Everything changes. Again. Some Big Event could make everybody look at the candidates again, and that&#8217;s always bad for a front-runner, particularly one without much foreign-policy experience (if the Big Event is of that ilk).<\/li><\/ul>\n\n<p>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.\n\n\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric Alterman, whom Your Humble Blogger finds consistently interesting and provocative, has a particularly interesting entry today about John Kerry. I think it\u2019s worth reading, despite my current feeling that Sen. Kerry has no more chance of being the nominee&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16876,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596\/revisions\/16876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}