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Just 41 Weeks Left: The Election Year Begins
By Mark Grueter
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On Monday night, Howard Dean made a complete ass of himself. Right after Johns Edwards and Kerry beat the living shit out him, the former Vermont governor imagined it witty to address his supporters with the tone of a mad clown. I won’t dwell on this point because most readers will have already seen or read about this twisted and humiliating performance. Plus, it’s not difficult to pile on a defeated man. Dean is finished. He will be pummeled on Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary and then we’ll all wonder what the hell that was all about. He had no business being in this race and, really, his piss-poor showing in Iowa should not have come as a surprise. He was a terrible candidate to begin with.
But the real losers are the idiots who endorsed Dean - the two losers of the 2000 race, Al Gore and Bill Bradley, along with other politically tone-deaf and frivolous people like Martin Sheen and Tom Harkin. Gore, who was posturing for 2008 by siding with Dean, now looks very pathetic, small and irrelevant.
So, onto to New Hampshire, where John Kerry looks really strong. It’s hard to see how the majority of traditional New Hampshire Democrats will not vote for Senator Kerry - he will be very tough to beat this week. Edwards will get a “bump” from Iowa as well, but he he’s unlikely to place higher than third, in my view. Wesley Clark has been gaining strength in New Hampshire, where Independents vote in large droves in the primaries. He’s had huge crowds all week and his poll numbers are growing. Because he’s not a politician, because of his redoubtable military career and because he’s politically independent, he attracts young voters and, not surprisingly, other independents. It is important to note that the polls probably won’t be sound indicators of the actual results until the eve of the election. This is because, as Iowa demonstrated, many voters probably won’t make up their minds until the last moment. And even if Kerry takes New Hampshire, which seems like the best bet, the race will not be over.
Clark and Edwards will still contend for the nomination and February 3rd will be a big day with seven states voting. John McCain destroyed George W. Bush in New Hampshire only to lose the key state of South Carolina a week later. Clark has shown great strength nationally, in Arizona and South Carolina, and John Edwards’s natural base is the south and midwest. So Kerry, unless he somehow manages to take South Carolina coming off a New Hampshire victory, will have long, arduous battle to fight.
The always soporific State of the Union charade was presented by Bush on Tuesday night. It was a campaign speech and Bush stuck to his guns: the tax cuts worked, the war was justified, America is safer and all the rest of it. The speech, written by God knows who, was riddled with semi-clever obfuscatory statements. For instance, “the work of building Iraq is hard, and it is right” (Bush emphasizes the word ‘right’). Of course it is. But it would have been much easier and much more right had your administration paid any attention to the generals who argued for more troops to handle post-war construction. Or any attention to humanitarian and development organizations like USAID who had laid down plans to rebuild Iraq before the invasion. (See James Fallows’ piece in the latest Atlantic Monthly for this detailed information).
Bush answered the critics who are calling for a more internationalized effort in Iraq by pronouncing about a dozen countries, “and 17 others,” who are already with us. The punk smiles gleefully as he reads off his list. The fact that the US picks up over 90% of the costs, suffers over 90% of the casualties and dictates all the orders does not, in the President’s apparently tiny mind, do anything to dilute the notion that this is an “internationalized” effort.
And since no WMD have been found, Bush informs us that “dozens of WMD program-related activities” have been discovered. The Bush team remains obstinate. It refuses to apologize or to concede even an ounce of regret over anything. They are always right, the critics are always wrong and that’s that. The Democrats need to nominate a candidate who will not put up with this shit, and I still strongly believe General Clark is most capable and best positioned to do this.
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Mark Grueter is pursuing a Masters in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty for Political and Social Sciences. He is the Publications Manager and Web Editor for The Canon, the school's student publication and is a contributor to Stop Smiling, a magazine based in Chicago. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Grueter may be contacted at grueter@methree.net.
©
2004 Me Three