Tomorrow is the date for the caucuses: today our local NPR affiliate held a mock caucus on the radio, and never got past the first round. Dean and Kucinich garnered enough of the votes to take all the marbles and go home.
I wonder what tomorrow will bring. I won’t be there, though our household’s registered voter will be (I’d go but there’s some pesky business about citizenship that keeps me out of it). She is undecided and we talked some about it this afternoon. There are two competing ideas for me in this whole business. Do you choose someone’s who’s electable, meaning appealing enough to a lot of other people (in this case, meaning Kerry) or do you vote your beliefs, which could mean Dean, Kucinich, Clark, or Kerry?
On voting your beliefs
For many, this means Dean or Kucinich. I have to say I’m surprised at how poorly Dean has done so far. It makes me wonder how much truth there was to the observations that the Dean Meetups and all the rest of it were too introverted and not about building consensus outside the core of the faithful. Word was, the Dean followers were essentially just talking amongst themselves without taking their message to the rest of the party: if that’s accurate, we see the result.
So if Dean does well in the caucuses tomorrow, what does it mean? That Washington is that different from the rest of the country (harking back to the 47 states and the Soviet of Washington, circa 1950s)? Or will the Dean folks be able to make their case more clearly in that forum than their candidate has on the stump?
On going with the electable candidate
This is where people are more likely to stand up and be counted. Call this the “anyone but Bush” movement: they want someone who will win the election. Not to say it’s an unprincipled stance, but it’s more pragmatic than principled: there’s a willingness to accept the lesser of two evils. The best is the enemy of the good, and sometimes good is good enough.
Kerry seems like the obvious choice, given his momentum. And if he manages to find some way to chip away at the GOP base (like taking his current competitor, the senator from South Carolina, as his running mate), it just might work.
However it comes out, it will be informative.
To be sure, the sense I get from the news recently is like watching a crumbling facade. The phantom menace (the WMDs that no one can locate), the wild rumors about the president’s military service record, the “dump Cheney” movement, the senate file server permissions debacle, the possibility of federal indictments against senior White House staff for leaking the name of a covert CIA operative, groping for someone to blame for the bad intelligence on Iraq . . . . it’s been some tough sledding these past couple of weeks. Not that I’m sorry for the folks who’re feeling the pain: self-inflicted wounds don’t merit any sympathy. But it makes “anyone but Bush” a real possibility.