latest CW on Kerry is not good

More concern- valid or should we hold our noses and vote for Kerry?

&c.
KERRY 36,000: I couldn't agree more with Will Saletan and Jon Chait on the subject of John Kerry's electability. Kerry is clearly benefiting from the fact that people think other people are going to vote for him down the road, which is why they're voting for him now; they're not voting for him because he's the candidate they personally want to be president. As Chait points out, this is classic bubble behavior--you buy a stock not because it's intrinsically valuable, but because other people are buying it and the price is going up (and you think both of these things is likely to continue). The problem with bubbles, both in politics and in financial markets, is that they tend to deflate just as rapidly as they inflate.http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml?pid=1314


Not because voters agree with him on the issues. The reason, according to exit polls, is that voters think he's the candidate most likely to beat President Bush. There's just one problem: The same polls suggest this may not be true.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2095311/

The message of the night is that John Kerry has proven his electability and all-around national appeal by winning two Southern primaries. I'm not buying it. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=chait021104

Which has become a fishwrap since Sullivan took the helm. I just have a hard time believing anything published in a magazine edited by Andrew Sullivan.

Now, as for the Saletan article, I'll say that the campaign against Bush has not begun yet. It's going to get real ugly real fast. Hell, it is ugly right now, and it's only been a few weeks since Howard Dean was the front runner. The AWOL story and the WMD controversy are just the tip of the iceberg. Who knows. Bush wasn't elected last time. Let's see if he can really lose this time.

And consider also that Kerry might not have gotten to where he is today because people think he's electable. He isn't a sexy candidate, that's for sure. So perhaps it was his experience/intelligence?

the "sexy' candidate wins nine times out of ten (not that I find * remotely sexy, but Kerry has all the sex appeal of the Grim Reaper).

Hmm, if the voters in the primaries are voting for Kerry because they think other voters will vote for Kerry later, then isn't it possible that they will vote for Kerry later when the vote counts to oust Bush?

I didn't read the articles, so please forgive my confusion to the logic of the statement.

Skarbrowe

didn't write these. Andrew supported the war but has been all over b* on wmds, gay marriage, the deficit.. etc


for a more complete look at his stance towards b*co-

" 'But all this is a red herring; my point is merely that Andrew Sullivan did not just get "off the reservation". He has not been a Bush apparatchik. Read his blog more assiduously. He's denounced Bush's tendency toward big government spending, deplored hints of his social conservatism with respect to gay marriage, and has acknowledged before now the intelligence failure regarding WMDs.http://www.curiousstranger.org/2004/01/andrew_sullivan.html

Of course he would see Sullivan's occasional tepid nits with Bush policy as evidence of freerange thinking.

Andy's most critical moments always seem to coincide with the dark nights of the soul he endures when faced with the fact that the party he loves would happily legislate him out of existence if they could get away with it. I doubt we'd be enjoying this flurry of out-of-character screeds from him if gay marriage wasn't currently a prominent national issue.

"They figured the guy who had won Iowa and New Hampshire was a winner. So, they voted for him, proving themselves right." (from Saletan)

It is an interesting number crunching article that undercuts that theory based on the voters themselves. It doesn't take certain unknowables into consideration, though. Although the article makes a good case for Edwards "electability" in the General election, it does not take into account the lack of scrutiny he has received or his own "bump" from Iowa. Their bumps were simply different. One got an electabilty bump the other an overall likability bump. Neither of these have really been put to the test.

I don't think Edwards could survive a General election, not against Bush, who is going to run on National Security very hard. Edwards has zero credibility in that area, and unless there is a groundswell of economic discontent that reaches the levels of outright fury that his father had to deal with, Bush can always take out the war and security card. Never underestimate the power of fear. Or incumbency.

for whoever they voted for. It is not mutually exclusive: You can think John Kerry is the "most electable" and also think he "agrees with you on the major issues" and "stands up for his beliefs."

To suggest otherwise, is disingenuous, and Saletan knows it.

To buttress my case:

John Kerry's support is incredibly broad-based. In Virginia and Tennessee,

• He won among Americans of all ages, incomes, and races.

• He won among voters who said that they're top issue was economy and jobs, health care, education, taxes, and national security.

• He won among voters who were looking for a candidate with experience, a candidate who stands up for his beliefs, and a candidate who can beat Bush.

• He won among voters who described themselves as very liberal, moderate, and very conservative.

:boring:

thought Kerry would beat Gov. Weld in 96. The conventional wisdom was, here's Kerry and here's a photogenic fair-haired moderate republican. Kerry has magic powers. Debra Winger? Magic powers. Wait that's Bob Kerrey. Who did Kerry go out with?

- so why should Chait, Scheiber, and Saletan suddenly have developed real insight into this race?

I agree that John Kerry's momentum and appeal is at something of a peak and a fall-off is down the road. But that's usually the case for the frontrunner/nominee in the primary elections and in the period between them and the general election campaign.

The rest of the twaddle is some overly conventional elderly white male Beltway pundits trying to get their minds around things they don't really understand. (Well, okay, maybe that is their de facto job description.) But just because they can't explain the basis for trust in Kerry's chances to themselves doesn't mean that there is none or that it can't be meaningfully articulated: it just means that they are inadequate to the task.

As their record so far demonstrates.

I think it comes from miscomprehension of the Gore voters, the plurality they find inexplicable and try not to deal with.

There has been a record turnout so far for many of these primaries. The exit polls have shown a great discontent with Bush and a great interest in a candidate that can "beat him".

This paints a picture of a Party pretty desperate to get rid of the current rethugs (not always the case). There is a sense of urgency. But desperation, anger and urgency are not the best state of mind when making decisions.

You could easily make the case that based on that state of mind in the Party, that there was an over-eagerness to latch on to the first candidate that stood out, that won something, and that this attitude is having too much of an influence on Kerry's great momentum. It is clear that poll numbers put him on top almost overnight after his Iowa win. You cannot attribute that to some real, identifiable "connection" with Kerry, other than the fact that, well, he won, therefore, he's a "winner".

People knew Gore for eight years as VP. They knew what they were getting when they voted for him, despite the media attempts to recreate him as the worst. candidate. ever.

Of course this is all speculation. But what else have we got to do until people actually vote?

I mean, you make Democratic primary voters out to be a hopeless bunch of fools.

First of all, Dean won the first primary. It's the non-binding one in DC on January 13, and he got 43%.

The second thing is that maybe Iowa, and then New Hampshire, primary voters weren't looking for a guy who got all the details right or appealed only to their emotionality. Maybe there are intelligent criteria by which large numbers of people discern by majority who is a winning candidate and who isn't in the political sweepstakes of 2004. It wasn't poll numbers that drew people to Kerry when he stood at 11% in Iowa and Dean at 40%. The political weight of Iowa and New Hampshire is due to the people there seeing all of the candidates a lot, to the point of despising most or all of them. These were not naive or uninformed people- the vague-sounding answers they gave reporters and pollsters had to do with that they had considered all the usual criteria of positions and personality and decided it wasn't the details, it was the composite picture that concerned them.

Overeagerness to latch on to the candidate that stood out first: now that would point a voter to Dean, not Kerry. Emotional voting seems to me the Edwards support- I can't find any other sound basis.

this is the first i've heard about the DC vote.

could you point me in a direction where i could find out more about this?

--jim k.

i'm particularly curious to figure out why it's news to me NOW, so far after the fact.

The numbers and links to them-

http://www.dcpoliticalreport.com/DC.htm

The story-

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13061-2004Jan13.html
http://www.washblade.com/2004/1-2/news/localnews/primary.cfm
http://www.american-reporter.com/2,267/305.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/14/politics/main593055.shtml

The reason it wasn't big news around here was that all the campaigns that pulled out didn't talk about it, and the Dean people weren't particularly out to advertise that their man won over Al Sharpton by 7.5%.

I said the argument can be made that they are responding, on a national level now, to Kerry in a way that is more emotional than reasoned.

Dean and his little moral victory in DC was so meaningless, it was barely a blip on the news, let alone some cause for momentum.

Obviously, Kerry had reached the voters in Iowa and NH on a personal level. He won Iowa when he was still considered dead, for all pratical purposes. These were victories he won on the ground, by people who had a long look at all of the candidates.

But winners of Iowa and even NH do not always go on to sweep through the primaries as he has, and in my opinion, some of that has to do with two things: the mindset of the Party right now ("get him out!") and the front loading of the primaries which gives little time for anyone other than the front runner, with all his free publicity and wins, to gain any headway. This was not the case before.

Nobody is saying that Kerry is a worthless candidate, elected by hysterical fools. That is an easy way to discredit what I think is a credible analysis of some of what is going on in the primaries this year. We will see if the voter's decisions where wise, in the end, or not. Nobody can say they know either way until November.

You alleged "desperation, anger, and urgency" and then bandwagon behavior. I don't think you left much room for reasoned behavior and reasonable people to act the same way out of sensible understandings.

I said the argument can be made that they are responding, on a national level now, to Kerry in a way that is more emotional than reasoned.

I think you're letting emotional form conceal what may have been a discernment of fairly objective substance. It may simply have been substance not terribly usual, so that people wanted other people to verify seeing it too before committing their opinion and votes.

Dean and his little moral victory in DC was so meaningless, it was barely a blip on the news, let alone some cause for momentum.

It represents as many voters as New Hampshire does and is about as representative or non-representative of the country as a whole. It can be spun as important just as easily as meaningless. Remember all those Iowa county fair straw polls that seemed such a deal in the fall?

the front loading of the primaries which gives little time for anyone other than the front runner, with all his free publicity and wins, to gain any headway

Well, Edwards won South Carolina pretty decisively and has played his regionalism for all it's worth. I don't think Kerry's structural advantages were so great in Virginia and Tennessee that they were out of reach for Edwards. Kerry won them on the stump, in my opinion.

We will see if the voter's decisions where wise, in the end, or not. Nobody can say they know either way until November.

Some RNC person said after the 'scream' thing that they'd wished to run against Dean in the general. They had figured he'd implode of his own accord but had hoped that would take until October to occur. So people are in a fashion predictable, sometimes sufficiently so.

I saw Kerry in '96. There is an uncertainty to all things, but I'm quite confident that he's going to be a much tougher and far more relevant and impressive figure in the fall than he can be now. The conservative and Old Left-ish Democrats will find enough common ground to reconcile, and developments in Iraq and matters gay marriage and the economy will be far more settled in the minds of people than they are now. He takes some time to learn the political terrain, that's true, but once he's learned it he becomes awfully hard to beat.

She voted for Reagan both times, Perot in 1992, Clinton in 1996, and Bush in 2000.

She likes Bush on a personal level, but doesn't think he's up to the job. She tells me she'd vote for Sen. Edwards or Gen. Clark. Won't vote for Kerry because of the Jane Fonda and Ted Kennedy connection.

No, I am not going to yell at her about it. She's an old woman, and she's not going to change her mind at this age.

I know she's just one person, but I think there are a lot more like her out there than we might think.

is going to have a field day with Kerry's legendary flip-flops.

maybe it doesn't worry anybody.

at least not until the Repubs attack machine goes into high gear
and raises a big stink about it.

don't know that only the repubs will find an easy target

It sounds like no Democrat could support any of that!!!

Surely, no one else did!

Oh wait. Almost all Democrats in the Senate did, in every case! And every one of these votes reflected the majority opinion of Democrats in the country, and in the state he represents in Congress!

does he feel the need to backtrack on them?

"Americans need to really understand the gravity and legitimacy of what is happening with Saddam Hussein. He has been given every opportunity in the world to comply. The president does not control the schedule of UNSCOM. The president did not withdraw the UNSCOM inspectors. And the president did not, obviously, cut a deal with Saddam Hussein to do this at this moment. Saddam Hussein has not complied. Saddam Hussein is pursuing a program to build weapons of mass destruction." (Sen. John Kerry, Press Conference, 12/16/98)

“I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002
   
"That's a good question. Let me try to evade you."
                               - Senator Paul Tsongas (D-MA)

subject line edited for structure

making a meaningful argument out of that.

See how many people really care. A few pundits have said that Kerry is excused most of his changes in emphasis or opinion because it closely fits the changes most Democratic voters have made in theirs.

Personally, I think it works for Kerry to fudge on many things- though far from all, of course. For example, his statements on gay marriage only confuse people if they're looking for changes, and people who aren't don't worry about the ambiguities as long as he doesn't contradict himself on commitment to non-discrimination in general. Gay marriage is going to tip one way or the other nationally in the next two or three months and trend that way for at least the rest of the year. And, having been to two gay marriages (my religious community has taken them under its care since 1995), I can attest to there being a certain ambiguity- a perceptible difference of a mild kind- that all notice and makes my gay friends think that it is rightly to be considered a third kind of thing, on par with straight marriage and above civil union (secular marriage) in a spiritual sense, but worthy of being distinguished by name in some fashion. Exactly how to make this argument into a political side, or a principle, especially when your audience and peers have had no relevant experience at all of such things, is pretty tricky when the rest of the world pretends that things are all binary. I see how one could be against legalizing gay marriage as identical to straight marriage as a result, though personally I find making it identical legally the right thing to do under the circumstances. In fact, I worry about the people who don't admit to any ambiguity in such things at all when off camera.

I'm not sure I see precisely what you mean to argue with the quotations you cite, not contradiction or hypocrisy at least, so I'll supply one of my own:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)." - Walt Whitman

Some people can make that claim and have it accepted, others can't. Life isn't fair. A certain amount of trust exists that Kerry will have things consistent, or at least right, when it matters, and you can hammer at it as you like. But may be that people write off your critiques with the 'consistency is a hobgoblin of small minds' rationale toward minor points of principle. Goedel proved that no comprehensive system can be erected on a limited number of axioms, that even mathematics must have a situational aspect and cannot be completely reduced to a basic set of abstractions. Politics is even more so.

Whether it's Kerry the DLCer/PPIer or Bush the PNACer, the owners and pillagers still win.

And the rest of us still lose.

the front runner.

Many people are making decisiosn based on their perceived hopes, not on the issues. And that is vulnerable to a bubble.