A few notes on the Dem candidates' debate in Detroit:

I'm not going to waste my time bitching about the questioners (partly
because I spent almost all of Saturday doing that, mainly because almost
anything is better than the Unholy Trinity of Woodruff/Greenfield/Crowley, so there's a lot less to bitch about) but I would like to single out the oft-whorish Gwen Iffel for one well-earned point of utter disdain: her "conventional wisdom" round of questioning, during which she confronted each candidate with a reductio of the most mindless shreds of stereotypical
Beltway nonsense about their various personal "flaws" and "weaknesses," and asked them to respond. So like: "Senator Edwards, you've pretty much blown everybody's high expectations..."; "General Clark, since everyone in the military hates you..."; "Senator Kerry, since you look so unpleasantly French..."

I mean, if there were some point to it all--some self-conscious
acknowledgment of the absurdity of the whole "conventional wisdom"
premise--something, I don't know...but Iffel was a real bitch about it, and
came across as simply throwing out a barrage of serial insults. It was
obvious that the crowd recognized this, and at least a couple of Iffel's
"questions" drew loud boos from the audience.

Speaking of boos, Lieberman got some too, and deservedly. What the HELL is wrong with that idiot? He really is suffering under the dangerous delusion that he can win--I'm sure he realizes there's no way in hell any nominee would have him as a running-mate--so he continues to conduct this pyrrhic strategy of attack-and-bad-joke. The man is a horrendous embarrassment.

In fact, I took a small measure of comfort from the fact that the
audience--a loud, raucous, "lively" audience, which I thought was
great--DID boo when they thought someone (i.e., Lieberman or Iffel) was
being mean. Now here's an idea--what if a kind of grassroots audience
strategy could be organized and implemented, whereby if a candidate
attacked a fellow candidate, or the questioner was asking blatantly
disrespectful "questions," the audience would ALWAYS boo loudly? It
wouldn't stop the questioners, I know, but I can guarantee you Lieberman
(and others) would seriously think twice before pulling that shit, and it
would show great solidarity among people who care about a Democratic victory.

Moving on...this whole race is in a weird situation. Trying to
handicap the "pros" and "cons" of having opposed the war, having opposed
the war but voted for the resolution, having voted for the resolution but
for/against the $87 billion, the meaningless refrain of
"consistency"...it's almost impossible to say how this is going to play
out. I know that last week Carville and others were touting that poll which
purported to show that a majority of Democrats favor a candidate who
approved of the war resolution but has subsequently been critical of Bush's
handling of it. That "finding" seems to me dubious at best, probably
meaningless, even if it offers some optimistic hope that voters can after
all handle "complexity" in a position, which I would like to believe is
true but am not keeping my fingers crossed.

Here are my main gut intuitions about the present scene:

1.) The Dean campaign has reached a turning point, where the surprise and excitement of his explosion have cooled not into a reversal of sentiment or backlash, but into a view of Dean's front-runner status as the actual new status-quo. That is, people are now recognizing that the default situation--unless someone takes some clear and dramatic action to change
it--is that Dean will be the nominee. It remains to be seen whether this realization will cause Dean-supporters to re-examine the substance of their support: whether everyone who sees Dean as a champion of a crucial turning point in the nationwide movement of anti-Bush energy will still be comfortable with Dean as the guy who's actually going to run against Bush. It would be silly to deny that there isn't some anxiety about this.

2.) The undeniable appeal of Edwards, even among those who support another candidate and/or don't believe Edwards can win the nomination. I watched this focus-group thing today on C-Span, conducted by the Annenberg Center, that attempted in that slightly absurd academic-type way to gauge
knowledge of the candidates and sentiment towards them among a group of very decidedly non-politically-savvy voters. I mean these people really did not know very much at all, and could barely attach names to the candidates' faces. But they did know the name Dean, and interestingly, the other name they seemed to know (more than Clark or Kerry) was Edwards. He was just somehow out there in the psyche, with some vague set of positive associations. My bet right now is on Edwards as the running-mate. Not only for the Southern thing, or the working-class thing, but because he seems
like someone who could actually be a running-mate without creating some monstrous collision of egos with the nominee.

3.) I don't know what the hell is going to happen with Clark. I still think
it would be fantastic if we all woke up tomorrow and the primaries were
over and Clark was just somehow the nominee...but man, I just really don't
know.

4.) There is a new sense--a sense that was pretty much non-existent at the
beginning of the month--that Kerry may be the best nominee after all. Maybe it's the high-level, undeniably "serious" figures who have associated themselves with his campaign. Maybe it's that, after all this time, no serious criticism seems to have stuck to him. There's just the bullcrap
"aloofness" thing, which the press had a ball with way back like a year ago when Kerry was the presumptive front-runner. Now call me optimistic, but I'm getting the sense--what with shit blowing up in Iraq every day, the unpopular reality of the $87 billion figure, and the widespread turn against Bush on actual issues of substance--I'm getting the sense that the old soft-smear-based-on-some-mannerism trick just isn't going to fly this time around. And somehow I see Kerry as just less threatened by that kind of "character"-critique than Dean and Clark could be by attacks on their
respective personality issues. There's a "solidity" to Kerry (yes I'll play this game if I must) that has become more apparent over time.

5.) Here's an obvious one: the sooner Lieberman gets the hell out, the
better for everyone and everything.

6.) It would be SO, SO much better if by the time of the next debate (in
late November, I believe) there are five candidates instead of nine. Will
that happen? No.

7.) Kucinich will win the nomination. Ha--just kidding.

O.K., that's it.