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it was Dean’s to lose. He had what dems were looking for until he went crazy.
Rudy’s strategy is to split the pro-life vote. He’ll continue to do that as long as romney, huckabee and mccain are in the race. Fred has to stand out a lot and Hunter isn’t making much of a difference so just being solid on the issues isn’t the most important factor.

“It” was never Dean’s to lose. He didn’t have what the Dems were looking for because he was crazy, as well as visibly shallow even when he was trading at 77 on IEM. The shrewd observers knew it. None of the big Dem guns came out for Dean when he looked invincible except Al Gore, who’s political judgment is legendary, but not in a good way.

The moment when Dean went very publicly crazy and issued the scream heard round the world came after his candidacy had imploded with a third-place finish in Iowa.

The lesson of the 2004 Democrat nomination contest is that implausible candidates (Dean, Clark) can look very strong but that they ultimately obey the law of gravity and come crashing to earth. When they do, plausible candidates can come from nowhere (let alone second place) to win.

Everybody in the Republican field this year is an implausible candidate, except Fred. Giuliani is an authoritarian statist. Mitt is a managerial statist. Hucksterbee is a religious statist. McCain has no ideological compass at all. None of them makes any sense for a conservative party.

On this basis alone Fred stands out more than enough to win. Starting in Iowa, voters will makes sense out of the chaos and they’ll do it with surprising speed.

Rudy’s strategy is to split the pro-life vote

Exactly.

It's frustrating to me that the Hunter/Paul/Huckabee/Tancredo folks can't or won't see through that strategy. By splitting up the conservative vote among several conservative candidates they're handing over the nomination to the man who will be most liberal RINO who has ever ran on the GOP ticket. I realize that Fred isn't as conservative as Hunter or some of the other also-rans. But he's far more so than either Rudy or Mitt, and unlike Hunter and the rest of the field he can win both the nomination and the main event if all the conservatives would just get on board and stop Rudy from walking away with the nomination by a plurality win but without the support of a large segment of the GOP base in the general election. AFAIC that situation would guarantee a Hillary win and the worst of all possible outcomes for the next two presidential terms.

Rudy can't beat Hillary without the support of virtually all the 25 million social conservatives who voted in '04 according to exit polls, and I don't believe that level of support will be there from the evangelical and devout Catholic vote bloc if Rudy is the nominee. Mitt would no doubt do better in that demographic sector, but still not well enough to win IMHO.