Michael Crowley’s (subscription-only) TNR article about Massachusetts Democrats having no real enthusiasm for Kerry is, as far as I can tell, spot-on. The same goes for a lot of New Hampshire Democrats I know. Having grown up in the part of New Hampshire that’s part of the Boston media market, I can report: Kerry does not wear well with time. Mickey Kaus’ entertaining obsession with this fact has led him, and his correspondents, to try to articulate just what it is about Kerry that becomes so grating over time, and he’s done as good a job as anyone. I certainly can’t articulate it myself. But I do know that he wears on the nerves, a lot.
The trouble is that that knowledge left me blindsided by Iowa. The last thing I expected was that Iowa voters would get less sick of Kerry over time. I think that in part they got so overwhelmed by Dean and Gephardt that they were still more sick of the latter two. But in a fair fight with the voters having equal exposure to all of the candidates, I have confidence that Kerry would have worn out his welcome. (Gephardt, whose politics I have made no secret of viewing as actively evil, is a far more pleasant person to listen to and, in my limited experience, interact with.)
Now Kerry seems sure to win New Hampshire tomorrow. But it seems joyless, dutiful. New Hampshire Democrats are lining up behind him in something the way that Crowley describes Massachusetts Democrats as doing– and in much the same way that so many Republicans lined up behind Bob Dole in 1996. The voters have tried the passionate enthusiasm thing with Dean, and worn themselves out; they’re now kind of collapsing back to Kerry out of exhaustion, as a default. The “Dated Dean, Married Kerry” buttons don’t fully communicate the dynamic, not without some tweaking. After dating a fiery, passionate guy who now seems a little nuts, these voters are lovelessly marrying the nearest single guy who seems basically grown-up and stable– someone who is boringly familiar but at least a known quantity. Maybe that will be enough to carry Kerry to the nomination. But ultimately I think it’s the path to Bob Dole’s electoral fate.
UPDATE: I think what I said above overlaps a lot with Noam Scheiber’s analysis.
Last summer, Dean seizes the front-runner mantle from Kerry and runs up an early lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, locking up large numbers of committed supporters. The effect is to make it difficult not only for Kerry to get traction in the race, but for any other candidate to get traction, as well. Then Dean proceeds to melt down–which sends people scurrying back to Kerry, who, as the former front-runner, is best positioned to re-absorb their support. (Again, no one other than Kerry has had a chance to emerge as an alternative to Dean during all the months Dean is padding his lead. Because of that, Kerry remains the de facto alternative.) And then, to cap things off, the instant conventional wisdom about how Dean (and Gephardt) lost Iowa is that they were too negative–which makes every candidate reluctant to criticize the new front-runner from this point forward. In a nutshell, Dean took a lot of voters out of play early and sat on them, then handed them over to Kerry just before the voting started, then made it virtually impossible for anyone to win them back. Kerry, as the beneficiary of such an incredible set of circumstances, does not strike me as a battle-hardened candidate. He strikes me as an extremely lucky SOB.
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