Long and winding, no attempt at editing, just thinking out loud, apologies as usual.
Howard Dean put the fire in this primary campaign. Dean was the man who channeled our anger, who made Democratic politics controversial again. He put the kick into this campaign, and the other candidates at times attempt to emulate his stump speech, appearing "angry", while trashing Dean all along for real anger.
Whatever. I think the assault that all the candidates and the media together performed on Dean was unconscionable, but you cannot rewrite history. What's done is done.
The West Coast still has'nt spoken up. It is not enough delegates to win, but a strong Dean showing on the West Coast will show something else - that there is a fracture in the Democratic party. It will show that so-called "heartland" voters, in guaranteed red states like Oklahoma, are not concerned with the same issues as anti-war liberals. This is very bad, because the candidate that wins the Democratic votes in red states like Oklahoma (why is so much importance given to the states that we will lose in the general election?) will have necessarily less support in liberal states that the Democratic party can win.
This fracture, if it emerges, really should worry the party. If a candidate wins the nomination based on appeal in "heartland" states and in particular on appeal to Democratic voters in states which are guaranteed to go Republican in the general election (like Oklahoma, for instance) it is a recipe for low base turnout in the alleged "safe" states at best or a third party spoiler loss to the Republicans at worse.
Would'nt it be just terrible if, somehow, because the party candidate is trying so hard to appear militaristic, religious, and "folksy" - ie, a Republican - that California is magically lost somehow in the general election? Either by a Democratic candidate appearing so "moderate" (ie, conservative) that a "moderate" Republican manages to out-"moderate" the Democratic candidate, or through same reason plus a Nader candidacy?
Myself, I really wish that the party would let the West Coast states hold our primaries first. For one thing, California has the greatest electoral catch of all the states, for another thing, these small or rural states are already way, way, way overrepresented in terms of electoral power, and by always looking at their campaigns first, the media impression of which primary candidate is a winner and which is a loser is decided by small-state and often rural voters. It is a recipe for burying any real liberal candidates, beneath a corn field in Iowa.
Just my thoughts for the moment. And, again, I really am looking forward to the end of the primary (with what appears to be an inevitable Dean loss) so that I can simply tune out the wretched general season to follow. The general campaign, I suspect, is going to be like a train wreck. Watch as John Kerry tries to saturate the air waves with more pictures of him in an army outfit than George Bush manages pictures of himself wrapped in a flag waving a rifle or whatever. Following the most cynical, wrongful war in the history of the nation, were going to see a campaign in which the two candidates try to "out-military" each other, following the worse loss of civil liberties and the greatest strides towards becoming a police state in the history of the nation, we're going to see both candidates struggle to out-terrorize each other, and following the worst degradation of church/state separation we've seen since before Ronald Reagan, we're going to watch the candidates trying to out-bible each other.
It will just be too awful to watch, and I will not be amazed if real liberal states don't turn out much for Kerry at the end of the campaign, though I am sure he'll go down fighting in Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida.