Don’t Be Careful What You Wish For
Some readers wonder why, if I want Howard Dean to be the Democratic presidential nominee, I’m being so open about it. If conservatives and Republicans publicly wish for Dean to be the Democratic nominee, wouldn’t that hurt his chances of winning the nomination?
The answer, curiously, is no.
Most Democrats - 69 percent in a recent Zogby poll - believe the president is likely to win re-election. Therefore, they’d rather go down “with their boots on” than attempt to make a real race of it. Also, core Democrats’ hatred of the president - see this screed for instance - makes it unlikely that they’ll trust anything that Republican or “moderate” Democrat strategists have to say. The kind of people who’re likely to vote in the Democratic primary seem to have decided that the only chance they have of beating George W. Bush is to wage all-out war against him by “standing up for what they believe in.” Thus, the more analysts like me point out that Dean is an unelectable radical, the more support he gets in the Democratic primary. Amazing, no?
-- PoliPundit