A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics
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A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics | |
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January 25, 2004Pivot PointWithin the next few days, the Democratic race will most likely shift toward two main themes:
Given present trends, it's likely that the challenger to Kerry will have a hard time matching him and ultimately beating him. A good portion of the more popular bloggers have long supported Wesley Clark, including Kevin Drum of CalPundit, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, and Andrew Northrup of The Poor Man. Recently, we've seen rapidly growing interest with John Edwards, and even some ambivalence from some who previously supported Clark. Josh Marshall had an interesting take on him after attending one of his rallies, and Andrew Northrup had similar reactions. A couple of the leading moderate Republican blogs -- Drezner and Tacitus -- have been particularly intrigued by an Edwards candidacy. I think it makes sense, at this moment, to create a space where we talk about this. It will go one way or the other fairly soon, and whatever modest influence we can have should be exercised over the next few days. Feel free to make your case here. I'll provide links below to discussions about this as they appear on other blogs. Here are the discussions:
Comments
I'm not ready to buy into the anointing of kerry as the sudden prohibitive favorite. He probably is going to be called the favorite for at least a week unless he only ekes out a win by a few points. But if the trends suggested by a variety of polls are accurate (by no means a sure bet!), then it looks like NH is going to cement Kerry and Dean in a close match and may anoint one of the other guys as the 3rd horse. My sense is that Clark is losing steam fast because he completely lacks charisma and is not connecting with people at all. It just seems to me that a ton of people have tried hard to like Clark, and have been unable to do it. Meanwhile, Edwards is easy to like. I think Dean has to stay close in the final NH numbers or he'll be seen as fading, and Clark needs to do better than 15% or he's not going to look especially viable. The interesting thing in the last Zogby poll I looked at is that the number of undecideds went down, but none of the undecideds went to Kerry, they went to Dean, Edwards, and Lieberman. So, again, IF these trends are real and not artifacts of polling variability, then this tells a tale, which is that in the northeast where he is known,Kerry has a ceiling, one which I'd expect to be lower down south. Especially when they start showing photos of Kerry as Dukakis's lieut. gov, and hugging Ted Kennedy. Posted by: brian keegan at January 26, 2004 12:59 PMI just found this unbelievably detailed compilation some guy out there is doing of all the daily NH tracking polls. Posted by: William Swann at January 26, 2004 01:02 PMCheck out Edwards' 56 page .pdf on his positions. I read that he's a policy wonk -- it shows. Kerry will be in trouble. After SC, it will be a 3 person race (sorry Joe, you're not nice enough, even if you're the best on the most important issue). The press would prolly like just a two person race, but 3 is still pretty good for the Dems. Edwards/ Kerry after the convention, even if Kerry leads going into it. His upbeat message: punish, er, tax the super rich, to give out more benefits to the mid-rich, er, US middle classes. Bush in Nov. Posted by: Tom Grey at January 28, 2004 11:10 AM |
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