The first Democratic Primary is over; plenty of words are going to be wasted here and elsewhere in the next few days figuring out the reasons behind Kerry's freakish victory, and what the Iowa primary means for the 2004 Presidential Race. I'll probably take my own shots at it; that's not the point of this diary.
For the first time, America had the opportunity to stare into the souls of some of the candidates, in victory and in defeat. And I don't think what we saw was good.
Bad weirdness, indeed.
I'll start with Dean, because that's who I'm supporting. For the record, I'm still supporting him. But his speech was
strange. I mean, he could've come out and said, we're obviously disappointed, but we feel we can do well in NH and elsewhere, we feel we need to get back to our core message, etc. He didn't do any of that.
This is as animated as I've seen Dean; it didn't seem natural to me. Of all the possibilites, Dean yelling at the cameras in Spanish was down there with "has an epileptic seizure" on my list of predictions. We saw one of two things tonight from Dean: the first possibility is that he simply tried a little too hard to re-energize his people and re-set the tone of his campaign. The other possibility is that Howard Dean has gone completely and totally off the deep end. We'll see which it is in the coming days.
Still, Dean was hardly the only one to say something a little nuts on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. The Kucinich/Edwards alliance (I use the term loosely; I believe we're in the run-up to a Kucinich endorsement of Edwards), for example, left me scratching my head. And Edwards' "politics of hope" hearken strongly back to Hubert Humphrey and the "politics of joy," which is probably not the comparison he wants.
Gephardt, rather than give a short, to the point concession (and subsequent quiet exit from public service), chose to talk morbidly and at length about his cancer-survivor son. I don't have a problem saying that weirded me out a little.
Finally, Kerry. Kerry and I still have our issues, but I can concede him a good victory tonight.
What I don't concede him is the quality of his speech. Damn, man, barns? Someone tell this man that even farmers don't actually live in their barns, would you please? And don't lead any more "spontaneous" cheering sessions, either; it really doesn't suit you. Kerry has learned, but it seemed to me that he's still trying to be the firebrand and the elder statesman at the same time. He's going to have to pick one or the other, or his candidacy will continue to have problems with message.
These are all issues that can be ironed out; they may not even be issues at all. But I don't see how we can win if we continue to have signals like these coming from our candidates.
Bad weirdness, indeed.