Dr. Potomac's Memo

Tuesday night showed us yet another way to lose a major party presidential nomination. In 1972, Ed Muskie took himself out of the race by crying in front of the Manchester Union-Leader headquarters which had unjustly attacked the candidate's wife. In 1988, Bob Dole lost the New Hampshire primary after snarling, "Stop lying about my record," in complaint of George H. W. Bush's anti-tax attack ads. This year it was Dr. Dean's post-caucus weird-out. At the moment the spotlight was burning the hotest, Dean brought his mental health into question with a not-so-presidential tantrum that revealed adangerously imbalanced inner-child. "Buyer's remorse" doesn't begin to describe how Democrats from Al "Hands of Stone" Gore to the union leadership of SEIU and AFSCME to Dean's starry-eyed precinct workers must feel.

Albert has suggest that Dean survives to fight another day. Others, like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson are arguing for a long race now that Dean has been dethroned. I beg to differ. John Kerry is 7/8ths of the way up the greasy poll now. The Washington Post reported this morning that Kerry enjoys a 70 percent favorable rating in New Hampshire which offers a lot of room for mind-changing among electibility-minded Democrats previously smitten by Dean. So, let's give Kerry a win in New Hampshire that effectively knocks Dean out of the race and exposes Wes Clark for the empty uniform he is. The long-race theory then holds that Kerry has "nowhere to go" because he mortgaged himself, literally, to win Iowa. This ignores the fact that once critical mass is reached (in Fred Barne's phrase) momentum trumps organization and a campaign begin to live off the land. Think Sherman's March to the Sea. Everyone, except Kerry, is off balance trying to absorb the abrupt change in terrain. Kerry, on the other hand, is vote scooping in a Democratic electorate that now has a potential nominee who has shown he can take a punch and is broadly acceptable to the country. If the Democrats ever needed a reason to love the Iowa flatlanders, this is it. Residual common sense has rescued them from the fate of nominating a rage-monkey for president.

The Kerry surge calls for some rather quick recalibration on the part of the Bush team. We now are up against a prize fighter instead of flaky weirdo. Kerry voted for the war and for the Iraq reconstruction package which, along with his Vietnam service, goes a long way toward innoculating him agains the charge of being soft on national security. As a liberal Democrat, he will have boatloads of proposals for government fine-tuning the economy and improving health care and education. Those are the pluses. The minuses are, well, that he is a U.S. Senator with thousands of votes to be scrutinized, misrepresented and exploited, and a rather wooden speaking style ("Sad-tree," as Albert's father describes him.) The infamous return of his Congressional Medal of Honor and dissembling over that event will be up for re-examination. The bottom line, however, is that President Bush must now run on his own accomplishments rather than against Dean's obvious loopiness. That will be a much tougher race to make.