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Dean is done, kaput, finished. All his little Deaniacs have taken their orange caps and gone home to pout and bitch about how the media screwed their ranting lunatic of a candidate. Vote strategically to draw the election out to the bitter end and drain their pathetic publicly funded piggy banks. Don't vote for Weasley or Lurch.

Absolutely. Though I don't think Dean is done.

Here is my analysis:
This race has become Dean vs. anti-Dean.
Clark had emerged as the early anti-Dean, but he missed his chance at the lock on that vote by skipping Iowa. With a strong finish by both Kerry and Edwards, those three will be battling for the same section of anti-Dean voters. I figure that is about 2/3 of the primary voters now. Dean and his supporters are an island to themselves and I don't think those core votes are transferable. Dean is like a more marketable LaRouche.

After Iowa, there are supposed to be three viable candidates, but with Clark and to a lesser extent Lieberman bypassing Iowa, they have unnaturally enlarged the the field. So with 4 or 5 candidates all fighting for the 2/3 of the voters who are loking for the anti-Dean, Dean may be able to squeak by with his core supporters. Kerry and Clark will split the votes in the northeast, and Edwards will split them with Clark in the South. Both candidates will cut into Clark and the other one's votes enough to keep them all below a third.

Had Dean not placed below Kerry and Edwards in Iowa then I believe those two would have been finished and it would have been a Dean/Clark race. Thanks to Dean's poor showing, those two have a renewed viability as the anti-Dean and it cuts directly into Clark.

It seems that all four of them (Dean, Kerry, Edwards Clark) will remain viable until at least Super Tuesday. It should be anyone's race until at least then. So yes, we want to make sure Dean stays in and maintains a slight advantage for optimum bitterness in the race.