Your comment is quite revealing: people look at John Kerry and 'see' Vietnam, and they look at the idiotic claims about the GOP and Hoover and they 'see' the Depression, so they vote Republican.

That is why the shrill negativism the Democrats have embraced will be their doom. The old formulas don't work anymore, and worse, people are tired of hearing them or they are too young to understand them. The undistilled hatred of a Howard Dean may appeal to the angry left and some foolish college students, but they have little influence nationally and will not determine any Presidential election.

One is reminded of the 'peasants with pitchforks'. They hurt Bush Sr. in the primaries, but that was it. The Deaniacs will have the same effect, although it will be magnified because of the media attention and because the party will never coalesce behind him now. His numbers v. the President will probably not move more than 5% between now and next November (and could even get worse).

It's hard to see Bush losing his huge advantage over Dean on national security issues, barring another major terrorist attack in this country that can be credibly blamed on Bush. This is just a big liability that Dean will have to carry throughout the campaign.

The really worrisome number for Dean is how poorly he does against Bush on domestic issues like the economy, stupid. As Bush's approval numbers on the economy rise with the economic good news, this Dean disadvantage will only grow.

The story raises a rather forlorn hope that voters don't know much about Dean. Too bad for the guys at AP, but voters seem to have figured out that Dean is weak on terrorism, hot to raise taxes, and something of an angry jerk. That first impression will be mighty hard to overcome.

Some might say that polls this early are meaningless. But it's hard to see Dean mounting much of a credible threat to a popular incumbent when he starts this far back.

The more exposure he gets the less folks like him--that's a bad recipe in politics.

What happened to the 60-40 headline? or is that only for the Senate and this headline refers to the President race?

AWW:

Bingo--thanks to federalism you can turn support in the 50+% range into 60 Senators.

That poll was odd, and I'm not sure how useful it is. The questions are posted on the website. They basically assumed that Dean would be the nominee for most of their horserace questions, and then the last question in the poll, as posted, is who do you favor for the Democratic nomination. Unless they asked for nomination preference question first (I didn't see anything about question order online), the poll is meaningless on that question.

Jim, shrill negativism still works for the Democrats with certain members of the Democratic party, in particular black voters. Even though Dean isn't well liked by black voters, they will still vote for him in overwhelming numbers because they are Democrats and he is a Democrat.

I doubt if Dean will motivate the black community to vote the way they did for Clinton and Gore. It will probably be more like Mondale or McGovern. But we haven't heard brother Howard's position on reparations yet.

And if Rice is on the ticket, the dynamics will change, even if just by 500K votes nationwide.