Scott:
Media awake to sun rising in East
The stories they are hanging this on are Clark catching Dean in the national polls and passing Kerry in the NH polls. The metapoint that they are just waking up to is basic math
1. Dean has captured the angry left block. This has nothing to do with who voted how on any vote in Congress or made a speech saying whatever on some date. This is politics as psychotherapy. Dean has captured an attitude rather than a set of positions. If anything Clark's speeches are to the left of Dean's. Clark's speeches don't sound like temper tantrums by a sarcastic Boomer smart ass. Dean is saying on the stump what his core voters say to each other over their wine and brie.
2. Dean could have run a campaign with precious little money. See prior blog posts. Instead he has found a way to tap the net to have more money than anyone else. For the first time in the modern history of the Democratic Party a left insurgent has the money edge as well as the activist base.
3. Dean has not been able to crack the low twenties in the national polls or the forty point mark in the more activist venues of Iowa and NH. Put simply the bulk of the probable Democratic electorate would prefer someone who is not an angry left candidate but has been unimpressed to outright repulsed by the existing candidates. Kerry and Lieberman are essentially dead and just await burial. If one subtracts name reognition their support approximates zero. One cannot say Edwards died because except in his own mind he was never really alive. He was a media fresh face but never caught on beyond an interesting biography and his trial lawyer finance base. The two black candidates are easy to ignore. Absent the 800 pound gorilla effect of dissing the two blacks they would be ignored [image a white candidate with Sharpton's lack of a resume getting on the stage or even Braun's which is better but still absurdly outside the magic circle]. That leaves Gebhardt. He has the resume. He has yet to break beyond his traditional industrial [as opposed to civil service] union base and looks set to selfdestruct from lack of funds right after Iowa regardless of where it goes.
4. So play the hand out. The media having helped make Dean will now make tearing Dean down the story. This is an old one and Dean's negative personality makes it fun for media types who resent people who smart mouth to them.
5. So after NH and SC the race slims down to Dean, Clark, Sharpton and maybe Braun. Gebhardt runs out of money between SC, AZ, OK. Kerry dies in the snows of NH. Edwards and Lieberman run under 3rd in SC and vanish. Dean has a giant lead in money and the race goes into a set of states that need huge media buys very fast.
6. If Clark can stay alive it becomes a question of how hard the Clintons are going to try. Bill can get Clark enough money, especially out of Wall Street. There's enough Wall Street money that doesn't like Bush's economics, his war in Iraq or his heartland Christian cultural values. However Bill will have to come out from behind the curtain which could hurt Hillary in 2008.
7. The probable result is Dean 'wins' a bunch of primaries but reaches the end of the primaries with some 40% of the delegates. Sharpton and Braun [mostly Sharpton] have say 15%. 45% are scattered between the other establishment candidates and uncommitted. Could make for a fun endgame or Al Sharpton gets to be kingmaker.
8. Rove must be laughing himself spitless. The least electable major Democrat essentially locks things up just at the point where the media starts decontsructing him so for six months the story is inside baseball backroom deals and picking Dean's old statements apart while Bush gets to look 'Presidential'
9. There are solutions but they ALL require refusing to seat the Iowa and NH delegations at some future comnventions when you take away their 1st in the nation status and the state legislatures ignore the DNC.
As a political junkie I am in for a fun yeat. Poor America.
posted by scott 7:41 PM