Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean has brought out a large amount of wailing from Democrats who support other candidates (scroll down a few pages in those comments to see the start of it), on the grounds that Dean is unelectable. Despite the fact that no primaries have even happened yet, they're announcing that it's all over, Dean is the nominee, Bush has already won, there will be an embarrassing landslide and Democrats will lose many other elections, and... what precisely happens next is unclear, but this is where the speaker entertains the traditional Running Off To Canada fantasy, or just says some vague and scary thing like "we are screwed". Presumably we all end up in death camps or there's a global thermonuclear war or something.

(I find this kind of talk dangerously seductive because I'm pretty prone to apocalyptic thinking myself. I have this reputation as a level-headed guy mostly because I air out loud my efforts to talk myself out of exaggerated thoughts of doom; every so often the underlying catastrophizing tendency comes out a little and unnerves people. This is no reflection on the current situation but has happened all my life. I was convinced that Skylab was going to fall on me once.)



Anyway, at times like this it's good to step back and try to see if any of this is justified by evidence. First, the electability argument. There's a plausible notion, one that may well be true and that I've subscribed to at times myself, that on the basis of history and personality, Wesley Clark has a much better chance than Dean of surviving whatever smear jobs Karl Rove is going to toss in his direction. Particularly since the Republicans obviously don't want to run against him, and have already pretty much tipped their hand on anti-Clark strategy (mostly, the "Clark is insane" gambit) in order to defeat him in the primary; while the much nastier stuff you know they're going to toss at Dean is only just starting to emerge.

But based on that kind of biography/image reasoning, Al Gore really ought to be the president. (Here's where somebody always makes a crack about how he is the president. But he ought to have done well enough that the issue wouldn't have come up.) The way you campaign matters. Al Gore ran a weak campaign in 2000; even he says so. And I really haven't seen much evidence that Clark's campaign can do much better than that; it's just starting to come together now, and that's pretty late. Dean's, on the other hand, has the energy and aggressiveness of a barrel full of rabid badgers, and a tremendous supply of money and volunteers. That ought to count for something.

If you look at the polls... yes, Wesley Clark often does better than Dean in a hypothetical match-up against Bush. He does better by, usually, something like one or two percentage points, and all the other major Democrats are in the same ballpark. (Generic Democrat usually does better, sometimes actually beating Bush, but, then, Generic Challenger always does better than specific challengers in this kind of poll.) Neither Dean nor Clark does all that great (they both typically lose), and while the margin varies a lot from poll to poll, neither one of them gets creamed in a ridiculous Mondale/Reagan landslide either (contrary to my own guesses back in the spring). It's pretty close.

Now, granted, those are national polls and the popular vote isn't what counts, and you can make a good anecdotal case that Clark's advantage would be larger on the electoral map. But I think it's fair to say that there isn't a gigantic difference in their "if the election were held today" performance. Either one is going to need to gain some ground in order to win. And in that case, on the one hand you have military aura, some intellectual gravitas, really smart talk about foreign policy, and President Hair; and on the other you have relatively vast wads of money, a campaign manager who is turning out to be one of the great geniuses of the profession, a laudable tendency to use "you" statements instead of "I" statements, and the barrel of rabid badgers. It looks like a wash from where I'm standing. Bush's drop in popularity seems to have genuinely stabilized right now; there's not much evidence that he's going to get much more popular again, but if he does, it's doubtful that any Democrat can beat him.



But there's something else. Some people have been worrying that Dean's imagined landslide defeat would take other Democrats down. But I don't see the mechanism there. If anything, because of the level of enthusiasm for him, Dean's the most likely to get core Democratic Party voters out to the polls, which should give him coattails even if he loses. Crossover appeal wouldn't have that effect.

What Democrats are really up against today is a smoothly-running political machine nearly devoid of checks and balances, and encompassing the executive branch, Congressional Republicans, and arguably, about five out of nine Supreme Court justices. In Congress it's actually not terribly ideological; the Republicans are kept in line mostly through the incentive of unbelievable amounts of pork-barrel spending. I personally see the Congressional machine as more dangerous over the long term than a Republican presidency; it's a machine set up during the Clinton years for passing dumb laws, and now it's got no veto stopping it. You can argue that Democrats have helped pass lots of these dumb laws, and you'd be right, but I think a certain amount of wising up is happening. And the Dean campaign's explicit intention to try to help candidates in other races is an incredibly welcome development, something that increased my respect for them a notch or two.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that, while it may look this way, the 2004 presidential election is not the one and only up-or-down vote for the future of America. It could put a brake on Congressional stupidity, but if the well-disciplined machine in Congress stays in place it's just a temporary and partial solution. For Democrats there has to be a push forward on all fronts, and the strategies used over the past couple of decades have obviously not provided that, for all their effectiveness in winning the presidency a couple of times. I'm not sure Howard Dean is the strongest candidate as a person; I think he's OK on policy, though I have some reservations, as I do with everybody; but in his organization I see the one thing that could be a new and stronger party core, and that I find exciting. It would almost be a shame just to see that pushed aside, even if it does result in a marginally more electable candidate.




I tend to come back to the thought that, given the situation at this point, whoever manages to win the primary campaign is probably the strategically best candidate to put up against Bush, and to insist otherwise is probably over-thinking it. And I also think that if you want to affect the national discourse, screaming about how you're doomed to lose and therefore living in the end times is not really the way, however satisfying it may be.

Sometimes when I speak out against catastrophic thinking, in myself and others, people accuse me of breeding complacency. That's not what I'm trying to do. Complacency is one thing that keeps people from trying to change things, but despair is another, equally dangerous.