Stephen Green looks back through his archives and discovers that he was off on most of his assessments of the Democratic nomination struggle. I’m too lazy to go though the vast OTB archives but it looks, at this stage at least, like my crystal ball was a bit cloudy, too. I always thought that the race was going to come down to electable candidates because of the dampening effects of the early Southern primaries. I figured Dean could do well in the “retail” contests in Iowa and New Hampshire–although perhaps losing both of them to favorite sons Gephardt and Kerry–by energizing the base. But I thought, and indeed continue to think, that he’s not going to be very appealing in South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states.
What I didn’t count on was the early implosion of the Lieberman, Kerry and Edwards campaigns and the amazing success Dean has had in fundraising. Despite all the candidates and the fact that none but Lieberman was a true national “name brand,” this thing could essentially be over with before the first ballot is cast in New Hampshire. With so many of the primaries stacked at the beginning of the year, fundraising is even more crucial than ever. Right now, the only candidates I can see able to sustain a serious race against Dean are Gephardt–who pretty much HAS to win Iowa or he moves up three shades on the Toast-O-Meter–and Wes Clark, who has a pretty good team thanks to the Clinton Machine. But I don’t know who Clark’s base is at this point and Lieberman’s presumed base, organized labor, seems to be split between him and Dean. So the key is to survive the early primaries and hope there’s an “anybody but Howard Dean” movement. Of course, as Dennis Miller is fond of saying, I could be wrong.
