Here we are, 100 days or so from the start of voting in what will be a rapid-fire and rapidly decisive series of caucuses and primaries, and no one has one achieved true, slam-dunkable frontrunner status. Just the opposite: There are no fewer than six contenders with scenarios for victory realistic enough that they still must be taken seriously, try as some might to dismiss them.
As in the horserace, so on the issues. Hanging out together in interminable non-debate debates, the nine Democratic contenders seem at times to have congealed into a glutinous, undifferentiated mass, each sounding more and more like the other as the days pass. Now they’re all, at a minimum, for abolishing most of the Bush tax cuts; now they’re all complaining, with ever-growing fury, about Iraq. Rep. Dennis Kucinich remains the only Vegan, but give the others time. The result is the political equivalent of entropy.
That means it’s taken the Democrats nearly a year of crisscrossing the country and huffing and puffing on the campaign trail to reach one firm and seemingly final conclusion: Sen. Bob Graham isn’t ready for prime time. I’m glad we got that settled.
In the last year, contenders’ names have been run up and down the pole faster than souvenier flags atop the Capitol. Winsome, sharp and Southern, Sen. John Edwards was the first to get hot (then not) after Al Gore said “no” to another try. Then the Great Mentioner annointed Vietnam veteran Sen. John Kerry as the most prepared, presentable and, therefore, the most plausible nominee in wartime. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Dick Gephardt have been on The List all along, neither rocketing nor fading. Then along came Howard Dean, the Fiery Human Blog, who rose to prominence on a wave of Internet and anti-war activism. Until he came under withering attack. Then he was overtaken in the political buzz by Gen. Wesley Clark, the new beau ideal of Hollywood and Beltway insiders. Now Clark is coming under enemy fire, too.
National polls in this kind of race mean next to nothing, but they’re indicative of the general shape of the race as it begins in earnest. The new Newsweek poll shows the torpor I’m talking about: Clark is “leading” with a non-whopping 15 percent, followed by Lieberman with 13, Kerry with 11, Dean with 10, Gephardt with 8 and Edwards with 6. Throw in Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun–and why not, since each garners 5 points in the magazine’s poll–and you have a 10-point spread between the top and bottom of the pack. (I know you’re wondering about Kucinich: He clocked in at 1 percent.)
Before you ask, let me say that Gore isn’t going to change his mind and decide to run (he’s trying to become a cable TV mogul) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won’t run but, I think, would “reluctantly” accept a draft in the almost impossibly unlikely event that the Democratic convention in Boston next year becomes deadlocked. Fact is, the nominating sytem these days is set up to ensure that voters select the nominee, not a runaway convention. Someone, somehow, will get the 2,161 delegates in advance.
But how? I’ve been talking to the various campaigns and here, crudely summarized by me, is the early nominating season scenario for the “leading” contenders:
DEAN
He’s lost some “Mo” but not Mo-ney–or the troops on the ground. There is the world the rest of us inhabit and there is Dean World, which is still expanding even if Dean has leveled off, or even declined somewhat, in the polls. Inside Dean World–it’s blogs and Web pages, e-mails and Meetups–Dean is still The Man, and the attacks from the outside only make the folks inside the bubble more fervent, as far as I can tell. Campaign Manager Joe Trippi hopes to have 900,000 names on his e-mail list by the end of the year, with perhaps a third of those as contributors. That’s some organizational and financial clout. Dean is pursuing the classic route first blazed by Jimmy Carter: Rise in Iowa, win in New Hampshire, and the rest is history. The former Vermont governor is doing well in Iowa, where his organizational model may help him in the intensive work of getting people to caucuses on Election Day–and, if they follow through, in getting knowledgeable caucus leaders in the room (that’s the hard part).
If he wins Iowa (on Jan. 19), the theory goes, the sheer wave of media energy heading into his native (sort of) New England should help him lock up New Hampshire (on Jan. 27), where most polls put him in the lead. If he wins both of those states, then the emergent Un-Dean (whoever that is) will have to stop him in South Carolina, hardly an impossibility. But Dean’s organizers have been working on a flanking maneuver, plowing money and manpower into other states that select delegates on that day (including Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma (yes, Oklahoma) and Missouri. If Dean can win a majority of delegates on that day (Feb. 3), he may be unstoppable. At last that is the theory.
CLARK
Some have suggested to the general that he skip Iowa altogether, just as Sen. John McCain did against George W. Bush in 2000. It worked for McCain, because he could spend weeks on end in the Khyber Pass of politics, New Hampshire, and ambush Dubyah there. Clark is starting too late to camp out in New Hampshire, and no one is so overwhelmingly strong in Iowa that it’s worth skipping. I expect him to try to participate there, while tamping down expectations of any major showing.
New Hampshire is the Wild West of the East, and it loves its outsiders and shin-kickers of The System: McCarthy, McGovern, Hart, Buchanan, McCain… Howard Dean thought he was that man (and a local guy as well) but Clark has a chance to be the outsider darling. And in a state with plenty of moderate Democrats (and a vast cache of independent voters who can take either ballot in the primary), his history of flirtation with the Republican Party may not be such a bad thing in all cases. He doesn’t have to win the state, but if he can finish at or near the top, he’ll be set up to do well in some of the more conservative, and pro-military states who vote the following week. He’d probably want Dean to be the other main foe at the end.
KERRY
On paper, it’s still all there, even more so: Kerry has the battlefield record of Clark, the liberal credentials of a Kennedy, the foreign policy experience of a Clinton. The senator just has to find a place to win, early. He needs to finish in the money in Iowa, and at the top in New Hampshire. I used to think that he had to win New Hampshire, but he’s benefited from a decline in expectations there. At this point, no one expects him to win, so that if he finished a very competitive second, he’d still be in the ballgame–unless Dean has won both Iowa and New Hampshire, at which point it seems unlikely that Kerry would be chosen the Un-Dean.
That’s why Kerry has been banking on South Carolina, which is as important because it is in the Eastern time zone as because it is in the South. Results from that pro-military bastion will be in fairly early on the night of Feb. 3, and he has to come through there, if he hasn’t up north. No wonder Kerry relaunched his campaign not in Boston or Des Moines, but in Charleston.
Here’s a problem, though: To keep from falling beneath the waves in Iowa and elsewhere, Kerry has become an increasingly strident critic of the war. As such, it will be hard for him to be the flag-waving vet among the retirees in South Carolina. And if it turns out that they love the anti-war rhetoric, too, they might be tempted to go all the way to the Dean camp.
And he has to hope that Dean doesn’t win Iowa.
GEPHARDT
Its’ pretty simple: He’s got to win Iowa. No less an authority than Jimmy Hoffa Jr. said so. Unlike Britain, which has a Labour Party, America has none–except for the Gephardt campaign. He has been endorsed by nearly a score of major unions, and they will be working their collective tushes off for him in Iowa (or so the union guys have promised him). The industrial unions don’t mean as much as they used to in the state; some of the service unions have hung back and some are even flirting with former parttime Republican Clark. Gephardt won Iowa in 1988 where, by the way, a key figure in his campaign was Dean’s current campaign manager, Joe Trippi. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that there are no second acts in American lives.
The congressman has to hope he has one in Iowa.
LIEBERMAN
Newly relaunched as a populist opponent of the upper reaches of American incomes, Lieberman still has no illusions about winning early, or at least that’s what his handlers were telling me recently. They are trying to say that South Carolina and the other states on Feb. 3 will be the real start of the senator’s campaign. But that is a strategy that depends on the kindness of strangers–specifically, that no one comes roaring out of Iowa and New Hampshire with a head of steam. Ideal for Joe: Gephardt wins Iowa, then gets clobbered in New Hampshire by Dean. Then Joe could be the Un-Dean pretty much by himself. And if he is, the sense of decency for which he is known–and a laconic style honed in the insurance-industry lunch rooms of Hartford–could be a cool contrast.
EDWARDS
He’s spent a lot of money and has little to show for it, but Edwards can’t be written off just yet. He has studied his brief carefully, has become more assured on the trail, and looks like he has aged a good half-decade in the last year (so that he now looks to be of legal drinking age). He hasn’t made the sale with his son-of-a-millworker story and his courtroom-slick delivery, but he seems to be at ease and having a good time, which counts for a lot in politics, either on TV or at retail. If he is ever so lucky as to get into a debate one-on-one, look out. There is a reason why he made $20 million as a plaintiff’s attorney.
Poor finishes in Iowa and new Hampshire would doom him, of course. But if he can somehow get traction, especially in the latter place, he would still have a shot to make a strong showing in South Carolina, and could lift off from there. It’s a longshot, and he may run out of money before he gets a chance to see if the scenario is still plausible. But hey, that’s why they run the race.
