1. Yeah, I’m pretty f*cking depressed right now. Not quite ready to change my endorsement from Howard Dean to hopeless, unending despair, but bad enough. Let’s not talk about it.
2. Evidence that politics is weird, part one–Dennis Kucinich’s endorsement proved more influential than Al Gore’s, Bill Bradley’s, Tom Harkin’s combined.
3. Evidence that politics is weird, part two–except for the entry of Wesley Clark, the race right now looks more like it did nine months ago than it did a week or two ago: Kerry is the frontrunner insofar as there is one. Dean is the unelectable, passionate one with the most dedicated supporters, who must make a stand in New Hampshire. Edwards is the cute one (well, ok, that never changed) and the charismatic rising star. Gephardt’s a has been. Lieberman’s in denial (yeah, he was in denial even back then) and God only knows what Kucinich and Sharpton think they’re doing.
4. New Hampshire has three candidates within 10 points of each other, and the primary is in a week. This means that to a large extent, how positive or negative each candidate’s week of press coverage is will determine the Democratic nominee (or at least one of the two finalists.) This is very disturbing to me. The media aren’t fair, aren’t competent, and don’t have our party’s best interest at heart. If I were undecided I’d rely as much as possible on watching the candidates speak, reading their policy papers, talking to their supporters, etc., as little as possible on this week’s newspaper coverage, and not at all on TV news. The future of the republic should not hinge in any way on a more pretentious version of a Seventeen magazine “Who’s Hot/Who’s Not” list, but that’s exactly what we’re gonna get.
5. I think I’ve settled on a final order of preference, that is very unlikely to change before I vote:
Dean
Edwards
Clark
Kerry
6. Did anyone catch the literary reference in the title? And can anyone think of a better rhyme for caucus than “Max Baucus”?
Did anyone catch the literary reference in the title?
Yes.
And can anyone think of a better rhyme for caucus than “Max Baucus”?
You really rock us.
Don’t mock us.
Doug M.
Raucous?
Or do you young people over there not pronounce it correctly?
Shame about Iowa.
The media aren’t fair, aren’t competent, and don’t have our party’s best interest at heart.
I guess the competency question should really be decided in terms of what they’re trying to do, not what we think they should.
I don’t know that there has ever been any suggestion that the media have/should have political interests at heart. We know there are a lot of prominent pro-Republican, anti-Democrat journalists/broadcasters out there (and the opposite is also true; though I’m not sure, being British, what the balance is), and of course they are more interested in being anti-Democrat than promoting an effective opposition to bolster the democratic process.
Don’t want to go on much more since I’m not sure how much that comment was a calm reflection as opposed to a cry from the depths of the pit of despair.
“The media aren’t fair, aren’t competent, and don’t have our party’s best interest at heart.”
They don’t have my party’s best interest at heart, either. But I’m sorry that you’re feeling bad, and I wish that you weren’t.
Moe
PS: George Gordon, Lord Byron – although you may be thinking of a variant of one of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicle stories.
Oh, they certainly don’t have the Republican party’s best interest at heart either, nor should they. They’re just not very good at what they do. And when they talk about who’s most electable, they’re talking about who’s “in” that week, and not much else.
What killed me last night was seeing people say that Kerry won because he won such a positive campaign. I mean, I’ve been paying attention. It’s just not true. They’re just saying it because the person next to it was saying it. (Edwards and Clark have run the most positive campaigns, I think),
Next to them was saying it, rather. (And it’s actually “caucusing” that I can’t rhyme.)
The interesting thing is that 82% of voters in the Iowa caucus (presumably mostly or all Democrats) voted against the candidate endorsed by their own Senator. I guess Iowan voters really do not want to support the “architect” of the Northeast Dairy Company who has helped to put so many Midwestern dairy farmers out of business in order to enrich the less efficient farmers in his own State. Or perhaps Dean’s Canadian contemptuous comments on the Iowa caucuses were more important than Harkin’s endorsement.
I agree though that F-bomb Heinz-Kerry has not been running a positive campaign by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to the likes of Clark or Dean Dong, anyone would look like Mr. Sunshine. It also looks like after mortgaging his wife’s mansion for his floundering campaign, there was a report on the radio this morning that he is now hocking her family jewels and artwork.
Best part of the evening was watching the passive-aggressive Muppet give his concession speech and finally announce the end of his political career (good riddance) after his incredibly poor showing last night. Too bad he didn’t have a former chief of staff serving as a judge in Iowa to keep the polls open later for him. 😉
With Gephardt gone, the union endorsement and money will now be in play again during the remainder of the primary, which probably means we are going to see more calls for increased government spending and trade protectionism. With Braun out of the race (not that she was ever seriously in it) and the pro-abortion endorsement of NOW is also in play, they will probably be lurching even further to the left on social issues as well.
Re: 2, Political scientists who write about strategic voting have a big juicy bone thrown to them thanks to Kucinich. You’re right, it is weird — but it all makes sense in a way 😉
Well, “glaucous” comes to mind (especially if one has been reading Patrick O’Brian lately). And “stalk us” and “raw cuss” might be worked in…
Katherine,
Take heart, last night was a wonderful night for the Democratic Party. As a conservative? I find a Kerry/Edwards ticket to be formidable.
One lesson of last night though: NO ONE is any d*mn good at predicting elections. No one, but no one, could have called this a week ago and I’ve not yet found anyone who would’ve called it a day ago. That’s why I still think voting for the most “electable” candidate is a lousy idea–you do not know who’s most electable, you simply do not know. Dukakis was supposed to be the electable one at one point. So was Shannon O’Brien in Massachusetts.
I still think choosing the candidate that you think would make the best President is a good strategic vote in the long run–otherwise there is no political reward at all for integrity and courage and some ability to inspire, even in the primary. And those qualities slowly bleed out of the party.
(This is not so relevant now, because Dean probably needs to win NH to win the nomination, and even I don’t think he can turn it around that fast. And if he’s out, I think young Johnny Edwards is the best choice on both the strategeric and the good presidenting fronts.
(Kerry? All I can say is that I probably know him better than any of youse, I contacted his campaign about volunteering November of 2002 AFTER feeling betrayed on the war vote–and he is my fourth choice now on both fronts. It’s not close, either. Most folks have shorter memories than I do, so maybe he can prove me wrong. But I wouldn’t bet on it.)
The media’s role is to entertain, and they’ve turned politics into entertainment. Now, it’s expensive entertainment, but like any big-budget, lowbrow slash-and-burn-fest, it grabs Americans’ attention for a couple hours a week. And like any big-budget, lowbrow slash-and-burn-fest, you have to make sure you have stock characters. You need a hero. You need a villain. You need comic relief. You need each character to have personalities that can be summed up in a sentence. So Dean becomes the “mean, pessimistic, angry one.” And he gets shredded for it, because that’s what you do to “the villain,” while George W Bush lays out his sweeping and remarkably unheckled vision for sailing to Mars on billions of dollars worth of ice buckets, all to deliver the message, “He is inspirational.”
Then, of course, there are the Howard Finemans (saw him again last night on Hardball’s coverage. Why do I watch Hardball’s coverage? I think my loathing of Chris Matthews has cemented my bond with it) – those who have to rush with the flow of the conventional wisdom, or they won’t be one of the cool kids anymore. The print and television media is overrun with these people. They contribute to a species of groupthink that makes certain that only one message gets out about a given public persona at a time, and they are about as cognizant of any of this as individual lemmings rushing off a cliff. But they are proud, haughty lemmings, because by repeating the story they’ve heard everyone else tell, they confirm that they are “insiders.”
I’m not even a Dean guy and I am pissed and depressed, because the people who we get our information from – journalists and television personalities and the ever-prized Washington insiders – should not have this much power. Hell, half of them shouldn’t have jobs. But they’ve managed to turn the news into entertainment, and that’s turned us into spectators to democracy.
A couple less heated thoughts:
1. Kerry’s at the bottom of my list, too. I’ve forgiven Edwards and Gephardt for their pro-war votes, and I don’t care about the nit-picking over when Clark turned against the war – I like his ideas on terrorism and foreign policy, and that’s good enough for me. But Kerry has long tried to have it both ways – to take credit for being antiwar by retroactively opposing the war now, and to take pro-war credit for anything good that happens in it (for example, laying into Dean after Hussein’s capture). This has constantly left me with the impression that Kerry is just, well, oily and slippery on a fundamental level, and I just don’t like him that much.
2. Everyone is wanting to crown Kerry now, but that’s pretty myopic. The real story last night wasn’t Kerry coming back from the dead and emerging first – it was Edwards coming up from NOWHERE to land right behind Kerry (and but for 4 points, we would have a differnt Iowa Golden Boy). Post-New Hampshire, Kerry’s got no plan – and that’s Edwards’ stomping ground. Throw Clark in there and you realize at least one Southerner is coming out of New Hampshire and into South Carolina after next week, and then I can’t see how Kerry can last much longer.
3. Iowa is a MISERABLE predictor. Dole and Gephardt won it in ’88, Bush I beat Reagan there in ’80 then came in THIRD in ’88, Clinton lost it hard in ’92. Even when the winner of Iowa goes on to grab the presidency, it’s rarely because of Iowa – George W Bush was clobbered in ’00 by McCain in New Hampshire and really made the nomination in South Carolina. It’s the job of pundits and analysts to tell you how things are going to happen – even when they’re clueless. They are clueless about this race.
No one, but no one, could have called this a week ago and I’ve not yet found anyone who would’ve called it a day ago.
Daniel Drezner did, and he’s even in your section of the blogroll. He also points to the Des Moines Register poll that had the candidates ranked the way they ultimately finished, although there was a significant “Undecided” portion. Frankly, I don’t remember anyone in Iowa paying much attention to the Register, but that was four years ago. Maybe things have changed since then.
It’s still early. Kerry has some momentum coming out of this, and Dean needs to quickly do damge control. Still, Kerry’s short on organization and money, and what on Earth will he do after next week?
Maybe this means that primaries in some states other than Iowa and New Hampshire will be meaningful, and that’s a good thing. It does mean that the Democratic nominee will have spent a lot of his money just getting the nomination, but it also means that we’ll have had a more thorough debate over just what the party ought to be standing for, and what we want to do, and that’s a good thing too.
I meant the margin of victory more than the order of finish. I expected Kerry to win, but not to get more than twice as many delegates as Dean.
Munster Truck wrote:
I agree, however each of these comments are equally applicable to Wesley Clark.
So, Thorley, you’ll be voting for Dean, will you? ;=P
Nope, I prefer candidates who can refrain from shrieking like a little girl. 😉
Thorley, the Spleen! The Bile!
You’re not going to do this after every primary, are you? 🙂
Is there anyone out there who thinks that Kerry or Clark represent the progressive constituency in the least? I fear that if either of those get the nomination several million people on the left will simply stay home. That’s especially true of Clark.
On a sexist note, Edwards is SO pretty… is this going to translate into more votes from women and gays?