Scott: Well, two more states in and the pattern continues.
1. Kerry is on track to exhaust his opponents but there is no blowout and no one has dropped out
2. While no one has dropped out, Clark should. He made Tennesse his target and managed a strong 3rd. Per CNN his wife is keeping him in but all he is doing is clouding the results. He was single digits in Virginia barely beating Dean.
3. Dean is back to being the left spoiler he was this time last year. His one remaining advantage [the $] was pissed away. He matters only to the extent that he could bolt and take the hardcore Angry Left with him. His remarks flirt with that but then he keeps backing off. Head and heart in conflict it appears.
4. Edwards has the clearest strategy. Let Clark go. Clark’s as walking dead as Lieberman was after NH. If Clark doesn’t implode this week he will next or the week after. His staff hasn’t been paid in a week. The Clark boom was about being able to win. Kerry has THAT ecological niche sewn up. So let it get to a two man race [Dean being the Alan Keyes of this race] and then hope the media scrutiny of Kerry’s record explodes a bomb. It is a longshot strategy but Edwards really has little to lose. It’s an old Dixie game. You run the first time to get your name known. Lighting may strike but if not you have name recognition for NEXT time.
5. Kerry is so short of money that he’s taking two days off this week to work the phones. Can a man who has had to mortgage his house to stay in the race come up with enough cash to match Bush once the ad campaign gets into high gear. The major Democrats keep calling for the party to unite. I think they are idiots. Fox and CNN agreed that Kerry has benefited vastly from the once or more a week horse race stories. If Edwards and Clark both drop out Kerry beating Dean and the last two dwarves gets zero face time. It gets him off the screen and off the front pages [for that minority who still read] except for an occasion or two a month. Which comes back to the money. Bush has $150 million ish in the bank and can probably raise another $200 million. Without soft money Kerry will not be able to compete. Yes, Sorros and Hollywood can use ‘issue ad’ end runs but that is not quite the same. If Edwards stays in there is a weekly story which ends in a headline, Kerry wins. The flip side is that if a bomb surfaces [or if GOP op research is holding its bombs until the Democrats are effectively stuck with Kerry] it could be an awfully long year for the Democrats
6. A Kerry campaign means writing off the South. Does not mean he cannot win. Does mean that it opens up a major chance of major GOP advances in the Senate. Open seats in NC, SC, GA, FL, LA. A first termer in Arkansas. An open GOP seat in OK that could be put out of reach if the national Democrats abandon Dixie. Paradoxically Kerry could win and face a MORE intractable Congress than Clinton did.
7. A close race with Kerry running a ‘forget about Dixie’ strategy opens a real possibility that for the second time in a row Bush could lose the popular vote and win the electoral college. Dixie is historically low turnout. If both sides just put it in the GOP column it could be even lower than usual. And Nader/a generic Green/Dean could pull just enough votes in enough small states [OR, NM, IA, WS, MN] to tilt electoral votes while the Democrat runs up huge wins in traditionally high turnout northern states. See 1976 where this happened. Ford almost squeaked the electoral college while clearly losing the popular vote because of a few suicide slates by McCarthy in some small states.
posted by scott 7:51 PM