stats of the day

proportion of voters in Virginia Democratic primary
who believe John Kerry can beat G.W. Bush...........85%

proportion of votes in TV poll on the Lou Dobbs
Moneyline conservative cable TV program who believe the payroll records
released by the White House answer all the questions
about G.W. Bush's National Guard service...........5%

who believe they don't....................................95%



Wesley Clark gave the best speech of his campaign in thanking the voters of Tennessee, but he'd come in third, and was barely above 10% of the vote in Virginia, so Wednesday he will formally announce he's dropping out of the race.

Senator John Edwards gave a variation on his homily of last week, which was at once an extraordinary moment in American politics---like you'd imagine Jimmy Stewart playing him---and also kind of weird. He'd talk about the dire straits of a worker who had to tell his young daughter he'd just been fired, and his crowd would roar and he would smile that Jimmy Carter smile.

Senator John Kerry appeared more tired and more serious than usual, and wasn't as effective in his victory speech, which hasn't varied much, but that hardly mattered. He did make sure to include the lines that the media would transform into the soundbite of the night---that America had voted for change, in the east, in the west, in the north, and now the south. In Virginia he again got more than half the votes cast. Edwards was credited with a "respectable second," though he was thirty points behind Kerry. Edwards did about the same in Tennessee but Clark was about 10 points stronger there, and Kerry was in the mid 40 percentiles.

On to Wisconsin. It's possible these three candidates will be in the race until after the last primary, and possibly until the convention. Edwards is planning on a two man race but he was running behind Clark in this week's Wisconsin polls. He doesn't automatically pick up Clark's support (as he might in a southern state) so Wisconsin will be his last real test to take his campaign to the next level. Right now Dean is running second, and he's vowed to keep on going no matter the outcome. He may pick up some of the Clark "outsider" vote, but a lot of Clark's support will probably go to Kerry. Another 50%+ win is not out of the question. That they're contesting Wisconsin is good for Kerry. He's proven something different each week. Wisconsin is the first state so far to allow Independents and Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary. That will be the headline next Tuesday.

(There will be some tempted to suggest Clark as the v.p. on a Navy-Army ticket. Bad idea. Clark is still too much of a, if you'll pardon the expression, loose cannon. He can be incisive and very effective, but sometimes his competitiveness gets the better of him. )

Dean and Edwards can continue to pick up some delegates in Super Tuesday's 10 primaries, and if Edwards has surged into second place across the board, he may pick up more in the next block of Southern primaries in mid March. But nothing short of a revelation that John Kerry started out life as Johanna is likely to stop him, and victory after victory becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that he's a winner.

But it's not true that voters are voting for him just because he won the previous contests. The exit polls show the voters overwhelmingly believe he is the one to right the economy, to right foreign policy. In a year that seemed to be repeating the recent trend of voters going for novelty and the "outsider" candidate, primary voters cite Kerry's experience as an important reason they're voting for him, and an important reason they believe he can stand up against and beat Bush. Defeating an incumbent president who has taken the nation to war requires a candidate with stature, and Kerry is now the only candidate in the field who qualifies.

These primaries suggest that another bit of conventional wisdom may be faulty: a Massachusetts Democrat can't win in the South. We believe that Kerry's performance in the primary puts Virginia in play as well as Tennesee, along with Arkansas, Louisiana and---above all---Florida, where the African American vote is going to be huge, assuming they are permitted to vote this time. (Media bobbleheads who claim a Democrat can't win Virginia should notice that Kerry was standing next to the Democratic governor of Virginia, who had endorsed him and introduced him for his victory speech.

The only fly in the ointment so far: apparently all this corporation bashing has cut into the soft money that the Democratic party wants to raise, to counter the upcoming onslaught of slick negative advertising the Republicans must already be putting together. So we'll see if Americans can still be swayed into voting against their own interests by fifteen seconds of slick deception, repeated a hundred times a day.