Mark Steyn slices and dices the candidates and the campaign

I don't recall if this guy (Mark Steyn of spectator.uk) is conservative, liberal, or what, but he's entertaining enough. He does kinda trash all the candidates, so I guess he does not play favorites.

Here are some excerpts:

Take my neighbour Bill, a big supporter of the governor: he’s an elderly, dignified man, sings in the choir, always shows up to Town Meeting and School Board, and he spends most of the week calling up registered Democrats, like my assistant (we’re an equal-opportunity employer here), and trying to persuade them of the merits of Dean. If he saw that speech, he’ll be horrified. More to the point, even if he didn’t see it, he’ll be having to come up with some way of reassuring Dems who did and can’t believe their boring Vermont neighbour has turned into a psycho. The governor forgot he was on TV; he was playing to the young college kids in the hall, the ‘Deaniacs’ that he’d energised on the Internet and whose ‘intense’ ‘passion’ would, according to Dick Morris, drive them to the polls, transforming American politics for ever. Well, they didn’t show up. (This part's good:) Maybe they misunderstood and thought they could email their votes in, or leave them in the Comments section on Dean’s blog. Or maybe, like me when I’m trawling for kinky cyber-sex, they just said they’re 19 and mega-hip and they’re really 57 and 400 lbs.



The other big loser on Monday night was Wesley Clark. General Clark sat out Iowa to concentrate on New Hampshire, and by last week had successfully positioned himself as the unDean, the viable alternative to Howlin’ Howard. After Iowa, the proven unDeans are Senators John Kerry and John Edwards: against Dean’s 18 per cent, Kerry got 38 per cent and Edwards 32 per cent. More important than the numbers is that Clark is less the unDean than Dean Version 2.0. He’s certainly kookier than Dean, and, if any coherent message comes out of the caucuses, it’s that not all Democrats are ready to drive over the cliff on the Bush-haters’ bus. Two weeks ago, I mocked the way Kerry and Edwards had twisted themselves into pretzels over Iraq. But it seems that, given a choice between Bush and Bush-hatred, many Democrats are looking for something a little more nuanced, if only because nuanced incoherence is more politically viable than going for the Michael Moore vote. Clark chose to crawl way out on a limb after Dean. In Iowa, that branch got sawn off. From a European point of view, the BBC and the Guardian can fantasise about Bush losing to a fully paid-up Chomsky/Moore conspirazoid, but the Dems seem to have decided to give Planet Earth one last try. I wouldn’t be surprised if Clark came in fourth.



So who does that leave? John Kerry won Iowa and will get a bounce going into New Hampshire. But, even in his moment of triumph, the Massachusetts senator seemed tired — not just in the sore-throat up-all-night sense, but intellectually. His Iowa victory speech was way too long, especially when you consider it was basically his New Hampshire stump speech with the heartwarming human-interest stories from the Granite State replaced by heart-warming human-interest stories from the Hawkeye State. But the themes are stale — the ‘special interests’, Halliburton, Enron. It’s the genteel, house-trained. Massachusetts-patrician version of Dean dead-endism. And his big line of the night — that he was now the ‘Comeback Kerry’ — amply testifies to the sparkling quality of his rhetoric. He is, in fact, the Ketchup Kid, the wife of Big Ketchup heiress Theresa Heinz, and the question now is whether he can ketchup to Dean by Tuesday, and whether his cash-strapped campaign (he’s just mortgaged his home) gets rewarded for the way he left the Governor lying in a pool of the red stuff. Kerry’s campaign has got better (it could hardly have got worse), but Kerry hasn’t.

So I’d say the big winner from Iowa was the number two guy: John Edwards, the pretty-boy trial lawyer from North Carolina. He made by far the best speech and he’s a poor boy who pulled himself up from hardscrabble roots. Self-made is an easier sell than John Kerry and his Swiss finishing school. He’s from the south, which makes him more appealing than Kerry in electoral-college terms, and he’s likeable, which neutralises one of George W. Bush’s biggest advantages. Right about now, the mainstream media will be figuring that out and deciding he’s their new dreamboat, now that Dean’s gone bananas and Clark’s kinda weird.
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http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2004-01-24&id=3968


He kept saying Clark is kooky/weird. How is Clark kooky/weird? I have not seen that.

n/t

He writes for Hollinger.

Conrad Black, Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger all sit on the board at Hollinger.

I think you see where this is going.