In no particular order:
- I’m writing this before all the votes are in (64%) so I’m not sure by what exact spread Kerry will beat Dean but it looks as though Dean got trounced. It’s hovered at 39%/25% for awhile now with Clark and Edwards flipping back and forth for third.
- I’m not too mavelous with electoral politics, but I’m really not surprised to see Dean lose this one. I actually would have pegged him with a third place finish in New Hampshire before I saw the tracking polls. Unlike some I’m not quite ready to declare that his campaign is totally dead, but if it is it wasn’t New Hampshire that killed him. No, it wasn’t the primal scream, either.
I think Dean’s campaign toppled when he failed to win the Iowa primary simply because he failed to live up to (outrageous) expectations. When people saw Dean come in third in Iowa I think they started to view his campaign as all hype whether it ever actually was or not.
- I’m as comfortable with a Kerry candidacy as I am with an Edwards candidacy, so whichever goes on to win this thing is okay with me. Actually, they were probably the two of the four frontrunners I was most okay with. Of course, a dark horse could come out of the back and drop someone else into the lead, but I wouldn’t lay money on it.
- A nice thing about Kerry winning in New Hampshire is that some of the blogs that have been yelling “The doctor!” and “The general!” at each other for months have effectively come up a draw.
- The first person that suggests that Kerry is only winning because of rigged Diebold machines needs to get smacked. The issue of transparent electronic voting is too important to slaughter with the “my candidate can beat your candidate up” mud-slinging. Kerry’s just as good as anyone else; each of the candidates has strong points and weak points.
All in all, I’m curious to see how things play out in February..
Why, out of curiosity, do you rate Kerry above Dean (among frontrunners) in preference?
There’s not that much difference between them in terms of stated policies, but a lot of difference in how they raise money and who they’re beholden to, which has struck me all along as a great reason for progressives to support Dean. Also, of course: big difference in how they’ve reacted when disastrous Bush policies were temporarily popular–such as the Iraq war. How does a progressive prefer a guy who voted for the war?
As for me: I’m at least as okay with Kerry as president as I was with Clinton or Gore, but that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. And I’m a lot less happy with him as the *nominee*, because I think he’s got serious electability problems, much worse than Dean’s. Not that that really matters, of course; Bush is such a catastrophic president, I suspect almost anyone could beat him. But people do underestimate Kerry’s baggage.
Anyway, if it turns out that he’s the nominee, I can live with it (a little grudgingly, but only a little). I’ll donate, I’ll work for his campaign. But I’m genuinely curious why you prefer that outcome to a Dean nomination?
Let me make one thing clear before I get into this: Kerry’s not my guy. I never really settled on one candidate or another as “my candidate,” so Kerry’s tied with Edwards for fourth place to Mr./Ms. Mystery, Kucinich, and Braun.
As for why I’d rather have Kerry than Dean… There are a few reasons, but I’ll warn you ahead of time that they aren’t all rational. Anyway, here goes:
I opposed the war from the beginning, but I can see how some others might not have. I won’t hold that against them. Also, my memory may be failing me in this area but I don’t remember Howard Dean doing much protesting in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Maybe I just didn’t notice him, or he didn’t get coverage, but in any case I don’t know how he felt about things until the primary season had started to rev up.
That’s it, really. A couple rational (I feel) arguments and a personnal dislike for the candidate in question. It’s the lesser of two weasels, really.
For what it’s worth, Dean is still “ahead” in terms of total delegates, when one includes super-delegates. CNN’s Primary Scorecard shows Dean with 113 and Kerry with 94.
It’s interesting to note, though this probably isn’t a surprise to anyone, that the Democratic primary race is our only exercise in Proportional Representation electoral process, which as everyone knows means that Kerry doesn’t win all of New Hampshire’s delegates, just a proportion of them based on the percentage of the vote he got. After your post, Dean managed to squeeze out an additional delegate.
It’s also interesting to note that Dean actually got three extra delegates from Iowa than were reported by the electoral process, which I think are the super-delegates.
So, I guess I’m saying that it’s totally not over yet for Dean, though there is the momentum thing, which Dean has lost a lot of. Dean has been trying to fill up a million-dollar bat — something he generally hasn’t had a problem doing up until now — and seems stuck at around 600,000. It may be that people are leaving Dean in droves and have stopped contributing. If this is the case, Dean is probably finished, even if he doesn’t think so. I do think that his message is one that we need to carry with us, even if we don’t carry him as a candidate. His message (contrary to the media’s portrayal of it) has been consistently one of hope and inclusion.
As you say, February is going to mean a lot, but it could cause this to become a three-way race. If Edwards gathers a lot of support in the south, as he is expected to do (and possibly Clark, though, he’s really not living up to expectations, and I don’t think even performing well in the South can save him at this point, short of a decisive victory in several states) and Kerry probably will not do well, as the press will begin its destruction of him as the new front-runner, Dean may squeak there somewhere in the middle and pull in some more electoral votes.
Once we start hitting some really big states (with hundreds of electoral votes at stake), things will probably become apparent. But we could be in a position of not really knowing who the candidate is for a very long time. Or Kerry is the guy and we just don’t know it (in a numeric sense) yet.
I’m not sure if it was Atrios or someone else who said that it is actually in our favor to remain a moving target, so that the press and the Republicans can’t begin the long process of destroying any one particular candidate. As it is now, they have to keep switching back and forth and this sucks up their energy and keeps whoever is the eventual Democratic nominee somewhat under cover.
When all is done, though, I really hope that we can get back together and fall in behind one candidate. There are a lot of hard feelings on everyone’s side, not just the Dean supporters. It is going to be very difficult for us, after such an emotional primary season, to remember what the goal of this whole crazy, emotionally draining process was — the removal of the current sitting president. That’s actually what I fear the most, that we will be too fractured and too many people will be upset that “their guy” didn’t win, and stay home in November.
That will be the candidate’s job, to heal all of that emotional damage and to bring us all back together by November. I hope that whoever wins is capable of doing that. I would almost want, at this point, to base my choice on the nominee to be the one most likely to bring the party back together. Sadly, I don’t know who that person is. I tend to think Dean is, but I really can’t say that with any authority. I’m not sure anyone knows and we will have to have a great deal of faith in our future.
No way is this election in the bag, no matter who is the Democratic nominee, and no matter how much people google-bomb George Bush as unelectable. He is electable, he proved it in 2000 (by hook or by crook), and he can do it again. We can’t forget that and become complacent.
I think everyone is making too much of the ‘war vote’ issue. Everyone who voted for the resolution, even Hillary Rodham Clinton, did so on so-called “evidence”. Did they all know it was a lie?
Despite that, I’m not single issue or anything but Kerry has the best environmental voting record of all the candidates. If bUSH is re-elected, I predict he will dismantle the EPA next year. Already, hordes of EPA employees are jumping ship to save their livelihoods and reputations. I’m a wee bit of a greenie and I’m sick to death of what bUSH is doing to the environment.
PinkDreamPoppies: Thanks for the replies. As for the irrational reasons, I just couldn’t disagree with you more (Dean totally inspires me, Kerry I find kind of repellent). And I think the Deaniacs are great. Proud to be one.
The electability problem I was talking about wasn’t vulnerability to smears (though there’s plenty of that for both Kerry and Dean), it’s the fact that Kerry has an impaired ability to use certain weapons in this fight that I think we need to be able to use. Consider No Child Left Behind, for instance: A disastrous law; Virginia’s legislature just voted almost unanimously to back out of it, with even republicans making brutal assessments of how bad it is. We should be able to attack Bush on that. But Kerry voted for it. I think that will hurt him, if he’s nominated. It may not be fatal, but it’s not trivial either.
Also, the money thing is *very* important to me, if for no other reason than the fact that Dean is the one candidate running now who owes his political existence to a free and open internet. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts thing the FCC is doing, limiting competition and allowing more and more consolodation, is a payoff to big media interests. I can’t help thinking it would be a far better thing to have a president who wants to pay off the blogosphere.
I’ll support Kerry; hell, I’ll support any of them. But it’s not the way I’d prefer it to go, that’s all.
Evan,
A question for you about No Child yadayadayada:
As I understand it, the big problem with it is that it is mandated, yet severely underfunded. Not that it exists. (Although I think it’s a waste of time & resources).
Am I missing something? Can’t Kerry just say it would be good if funded? And wasn’t it Shrub & the R’s who were responsible for the budget that lacked the funding?
As to the personal feelings thing… I’m w/ PDP. Dean creeps me out. But I could well be in the minority here – I find shrub to come off as a repulsive bully. Kerry has a creepy look sometimes. Kinda like an old rubber mask look sometimes. But when he speaks he does not freak me out.
All that said, I have serious problems with each of the candidates. None are as bad as the usurper. But we also have 9 months for them to address those problems.
Here follows my NCLB rant. I’m not taking the time to fact check (bad me!), and I’ll take my lumps like a grown woman if I’m wrong.
The problem with NCLB is that it divides the students in the school into groups, allegedly to make sure that discrimination doesn’t happen, and mandates that all the groups make the same progress. Unfortunately, two of the groups are English as Second Language students and special needs students, and “progress” is measured using standardized testing. The ESL kids are going to have a hard time with a standardized test, just because they’re still learning English, and the special needs kids, well, some of them aren’t ever going to do well on a standardized test. If the school can’t bring up the scores of those groups, they can get flagged as a failing school — and instead of getting MORE support, they get LESS. Any schools which do succeed are required to accept any student that wants to transfer out of a “failing” school (within the same district), sucking more resources out of the “failing” schools (which get money allocated by head-count) and putting more pressures on the “successful” schools. Which has the very real possibility of driving down THEIR test scores, thus leading to their stigmatization as a “failing” school. As more schools are tagged as “failing”, pressure will increase to allow tax dollars to be distributed to private schools in the form of vouchers, since the system has “failed”.
Oh, and if I understand correctly, it only applies to the PUBLIC school system — private schools are exempt.
Thanks for the reminder Ab. I’d forgotten so much of that.
So, when are Republican pundits like David Brooks going to jump on the “Kerry isn’t electable” bandwagon?
Dean has to get his campaign in order, since there’s no second prize for him. Edwards and Clark can snag the VP spot with strong showings, however.
Why doesn’t Lieberman just bail? No one’s interested in him outside the Beltway – he was even beaten by Kucinich in some NH counties. (He might be a good VP candidate for Shrub, though….:)
You’re very welcome, Jake — I’ve got a spawn in the public school system, so NCLB and public education is very important to me. (Would I be this passionate if I wasn’t a parent of a school age child? I honestly don’t know.)
appreciate the CNN link, Ananna, but I notice that there are some states completely missing, including at least a few big ones (anybody for Missouri, say?). I guess it’s because of incomplete polling, but that adds a nontrivial amount of slop to their predictions . . .
As the mom of a special-needs child, I have to agree with Ab Normal. There are so few education choices and resources for special-needs kids in most districts, and the idea that funds will be cut from schools with higher numbers of special-needs kids is terrifying. Most families of special-needs kids don’t have the resources to move their kids out of a “failing” school, even if there were other choices available to them.
NCLB is a badly-concieved, badly implemented plan, unless of course the actual intention is to privatize education by making it difficult for public schools to function.
Regarding Kerry/Diebold: I’m pretty sure it was a paper ballot in the NH Primary?
ACM, as far as i know, those aren’t predictions, but actual delegates that are “won”, not based on polls or anything like that. Each state has a certain number of delegates and a certain number of super-delegates (there is a full explanation somewhere on that page, actually a link which goes to another page that has the whole complex description). Super-Delegates are usually party-insiders and Star-Chamber-types, or are elected at some point in the last election from caucusgoers. That may not be true for all states, or some states may wait to declare their super-delegates until after their primary or caucus or until the convention itself. Each state’s Democratic party has its own rules for how delegates and super-delegates are chosen. It’s a rather complex process.
Anyway, I mentioned Dean a lot and I am not certain that Trippi leaving and the new guy (whose name I forget, but who worked with Gore in 2000) will make much of a difference, so if one were to take my comments as a prediction, I guess my prediction wouldn’t change based on the big shakeup in the Dean campaign Wednesday. But I’m about as far away as one can get from understanding the finer points of the political process; everything I know, I learned on the CNN website by following the links. :)
Why can’t Dean be the VP? I’m confused.
NCLB comment: Also, besides all of that, I don’t think children have ever had to endure so much standardized testing before this. It is constant. They are constantly testing or getting ready for tests. It is awful and, IMO, reduces the quality of their education. My kids are in 6th and 2nd, FTR.
pseu said: “NCLB is a badly-concieved, badly implemented plan, unless of course the actual intention is to privatize education by making it difficult for public schools to function.”
*ding ding ding ding* I think that’s exactly the goal! Now what the hell can we do about it?
oops, meant to say to Tishie: I agree that the focus of my daughter’s education has been doing well on the standardized tests. 4th grade was a particular waste, as the entire focus for the whole year was the test they took for 2 weeks in April (the WASL for you Washingtonians out there). Yes, her school has excellent WASL scores. So fscking what? *bam bam bam* (