ALL DOWNHILL:

Kerry: He's Peaking, Already (ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, 2/22/04, CounterPunch)

By all rights John Kerry should have been at the top of his form, the night he won the Wisconsin primary. Even though the six biggest states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, New York and California have yet to vote, he's been hailed as the Democratic nominee, with hit teams already on the rampage, hunting down prospective Nader supporters, rounding up all known and prospective third party defectors from the Democratic standard, forcing them to kneel and kiss the Democratic Party platform under pain of death, while playing a tape of DNC chair Terry McAuliffe screaching "convert or die!"

Kerry has emerged from the bruising kiss of imputed scandal and, unless Ms Alex Polier or other women inconveniently crop up again, Teresa Heinz won't have to wield the carving knife she has threatened to deploy to her husband's private parts if his path to the White House is derailed by sexual scandal. Polier not withstanding, never has a candidate had to put up with less in the way of the baptism of sewage that is a vital part of the primary process. Dean and Clark drew all the fire. John Edwards, who could slice up Kerry in a minute, has adamantly refused to unleash his forensic artillery.

So did Kerry have the jaunty mien of triumph, that night in Madison? Not that we could see. His long face, albeit abbreviated by corrective surgery, remained lugubrious and he stumbled his way tiredly through Bob Shrum's phrases. The one thing all Democrats this year want is a winner. He doesn't feel like a winner to us.

Right now some polls show Kerry a few points ahead of Bush. Other polls show Kerry peaked on February 15 and has started to slip behind Bush. The states that voted for Gore in 2000, according to a Zogby poll, are softer on Kerry while Bush states remain strong for their man. As yet Karl Rove has yet to launch the Shock and Awe barrage that will explode over Kerry's head some time in the late summer, after the Democrats have got their boost in Boston.

Is anybody in America excited by a Kerry candidacy?

MORE:
Primary Colors (Elizabeth Drew, March 11, 2004, NY Review of Books)

Now that John Kerry seems the likely Democratic candidate, it's worth considering how the Democrats chose him, so that we can sort out the myths about the major candidates and the factors that have shaped the outcome thus far. The realities are unsettling. Not only have most of the candidates, abetted by the press and television, misrepresented themselves and their records, but much about the process of choosing the next nominee of the Democratic Party has gone seriously wrong, largely owing to mismanagement on the part of the Democratic National Committee and the treatment of the candidates by the press.

The idea behind bunching up the primaries within a few months, the brainchild of Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, was that the Democrats should select a candidate as quickly as possible, giving the nominee more time to raise the enormous amounts of money needed to respond to the heavily funded Republican advertising campaigns that have already begun. But what if the primary voters haven't had enough time to learn about the candidate they select? What if there could have been a better decision? Even with more time the Democrats have in the past made some weak and even preposterous choices of nominees, as they did with Michael Dukakis in 1988. The nominee could possibly govern us for the next four or eight years. In view of what's at stake, why should it be so important to complete the process so early—why not take two or three more months?

Under the new, compressed calendar, the nomination battle whooshes from state to state without giving the voters much time to reflect on the candidates and to take account of what has happened in the most recent contest, or contests. Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has found that Kerry's Iowa victory gave him an additional twenty to thirty percentage points virtually overnight in New Hampshire and several other states. The pollster John Zogby has said, "This year's front-loaded primary schedule appears to have worked well in favor of the front-runner—as it apparently was intended to." [...]

The foreshortened primary system isn't McAuliffe's only blunder. Placing the Democratic Convention in Boston—vulnerable to attack by the Republicans as unrepresentative of the country, the home of lefties and supporters of gay marriage—was another feckless act. (The traffic getting to the recently constructed Fleet Financial Center will be frightful.) It could well be a replay of the raucous 1984 "San Francisco Democrats" Convention, of which the Republicans made a mockery.

Still another McAuliffe blunder was to force the candidates—ten of them at the time—to engage in nearly weekly "debates" last autumn. The results were terrible for the party—ten squabbling candidates in a largely meaningless, time-and-energy-consuming blur. While debates can tell us some important things about the candidates, not least their temperaments as well as the quality of their language, they put pressure on each candidate to put on some sort of act, to show in an impossibly brief time a superior, distinctive personality and command of the issues; the debates therefore gave a strong impression of being fake. And the debates tend to be judged by the press according to showbiz standards: Who can produce the best (usually rehearsed) one-liner; who attacked whom the hardest; who is the most entertaining; who made a gaffe that can be the subject of more stories? Such abilities have little to do with governing.

In fact, according to those who know him, Rove can hardly believe his good fortune in being handed an opposition so blunder-prone.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 27, 2004 8:05 PM