Clinton was not underestimated in '92. Perot's role in the election WAS.
It's easy to do, surely Kerry, Gephardt and Edwards have underestimated Dean. I think GWB and his team is too smart to do that, however. It's like fishing, surely on an objective basis, the fisherman is always more intelligent than the fish, but a significant number of times, the fish gets away. Bush will play Dean like a bass, then reel him in when its all over.
I hadn't wanted Dean to wrap this up quite as quickly, but it does give Karl Rove and the re-election team a sharp focus on who to target next year. There's still time for fun and games from Sharpton, and I expect there to be at least one knock-down, drag-out debate fight before Iowa, enough to leave a nasty taste in most Rat mouths. Right now, I'm enjoying the editorials over at Slate that bemoan the fact that Dean pretty much has the Rat nomination in the palm of his hand. It's a lot of fun to see establishment Rats so very sad!
Yes, 'fraid 'so.
I told a co-worker eight months ago (a Democrat co-worker, no less, although a "moderate" in some areas; that is, he was more inclined to Libertarianism on small business, environmental regulations, hunting rifles, cigarettes, etc. than to rigid command-and-control Leftism) that my three top picks for the Democrat Nomination were, in order:
This was long before Clark entered the race, although I was frankly surpised Clark's entry enjoyed as much attention as it did -- and I am not at all surprised he has flamed-out just as quickly. I guess Kerry was the presumed front-runner at that point, probably followed by Lieberman -- but I never thought either of these boring hacks would "sell" outside of New England. I figured Bob Graham would gain some support as a Florida "favorite son" (botched that one) and "young, charismatic" (i.e., slick and photogenic) John Edwards would sweep his native North Carolina and a couple Southern states (still possible, but looking most unlikely), but that in the end Howard Dean...
You know, Howard Dean... former Governor of Vermont? He should, I reasoned, be able to gather votes from both the Democrat liberal Left on his anti-war, pro-homosexual policies, and from the Democrat blue-collar "Right" on his pro-Second Amendment policies, and so when all the chips had fallen...
And that's the point: eight months ago, even Democrat poli-sci majors hadn't heard of Howard Dean -- he was then running at around 2% in the national polls of registered Democrats (to paraphrase one of Pat Buchanan's funniest quips ever, "Given the poll's 3-point margin of error, we can't be certain that this fellow actually exists"). Now he's an all-but-unbeatable front-runner for the Democrat Nomination, with the broadest and most enthusiastic grass-roots base of any Democrat nominee in recent memory (of critical importance, he has the lowest average dollar-amount donation of any candidate -- which means those millions and millions of dollars in his war chest are pouring in from tens of thousands of small donors) -- all in eight months.
Not someone to underestimate.
True, he's well to the left of the "muddled Middle", but often-times, the Middle doesn't vote -- at least not as much as the Partisans of right and left. Turnout is key.
In the end, it appears that a potentially-robust 2004 Economy may carry Bush to re-election -- Bush II, like Reagan, suffered his recession in the first years of his term; unlike his father Bush I, who barely put his own recession behind him by the time the Voting Booths opened. I personally suspect that by November of next year, Iraq will actually be a drag upon Bush, by perhaps 2 or 3 percentage points -- too many lies were told about tens of thousands of liters of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction which, inconveniently, didn't actually exist (and that, in itself, is a pity -- there was plenty of evidence of Iraqi terrorist training camps at "hijacker school" Salman Pak and the like to provide a pretext for war; but the NeoCons, in their infinite wisdom, thought that hyped-up WMD allegations would be a sexier "sell"). But in the end, I think that a strong 2004 Economy will help Bush to defeat Dean -- at least, I think so. At this point.
Time will tell.