After New Hampshire…: Building Toward a Clear Conservative-Liberal Fall Campaign

The Richmond [VA] Times-Dispatch ^ | January 29, 2004 | Ross Mackenzie

[quidnunc]

So now it's probably not going to be Howard Dean after all, but John Kerry.

Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire evidently understood that Dean had utterly no prayer of defeating President Bush, and fell in behind someone who thinks similarly but presents differently.

Rationally so or not, many pols have defining moments:

John Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you … " and Barry Goldwater's "extremism in defense of virtue is no vice." Jimmy Carter and the killer rabbit and "malaise" and lusting in his heart. Ronald Reagan's "it's my microphone, I paid for it" and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Ed Muskie's tears; Michael Dukakis in the tank. George Bush I's "read my lips." Bill Clinton and the bimbo eruptions, etc.

Howard Dean's was the post-Iowa outburst. Things had been building to it — in his statement that the removal (and capture) of Saddam had not made America safer, and in his general abrasiveness revealed perhaps most tellingly prior to the Iowa vote when he ripped a seemingly innocent elderly questioner, snippily telling him to shut up and sit down. The post-Iowa outburst simply confirmed what many had only suspected.

After that, Dean had practically no chance of carrying New Hampshire or any other state. In New Hampshire he metamorphosed into Mr. Kinder Gentler. And when the New Hampshire results were in he tried to put on his best face with Larry King, saying: We came in second and I think that's good. We recovered from our performance in Iowa. I'm very pleased. This from a man who, with a second-place finish 13 points behind Kerry, had imploded and blown a 25-percent lead just three weeks earlier. So long, Howard.

-snip-

[GeronL]

who is the conservative supposed to be?? I don't get it....