So is Howard Dean finito, just like that?
The Wednesday morning polls from New Hampshire confirm what seemed likely: that his formerly overpowering lead in that state is either gone or has dwindled down to the very contestable single-digit area. Theories abound on the Dean collapse. Mine can be expressed in one word: timing.
After his endorsement from Al Gore, lots of people (yes, me, too) started to think he was looking all but inevitable. This was not so much because of the power of a Gore endorsement but because that moment was a culmination of a series of brilliant and perfectly timed moves by the Dean campaign that made everyone else look like they were running for sergeant at arms of the Rotary Club. For months, Dean's campaign seemed to have almost divine powers of insight as if the candidate and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, were up there in the heavens watching this all unfold on history's time line, always knowing what to do next -- days or even weeks in advance.
Then, not long after the Gore endorsement, they started to lose their touch. That was the moment, as I wrote back on Dec. 31, when Dean needed "to start thinking more about the voters who aren't already part of his movement than the ones who are."
The single most important thing Dean should have done, which probably would have balanced out all his misstatements and gaffes, was to retool his stump speech. The speech itself -- "take our country back," "you have the power," all that -- was great, and it got him where he was. But it's an insurgent's speech. It's not a front-runner's speech. A front-runner's speech looks to the future and finds subtle and nonchalant ways to suggest (without really suggesting) that the person speaking these words is indeed inevitable.
This new speech should also have thrown a few implicit bones to the Democratic establishment Dean had been thrashing. He could have come out in favor of something important to the Democratic Leadership Council. He wouldn't need to have said that explicitly; Al From and Bruce Reed would have heard the speech and understood. He could have tipped his cap to Tom Daschle and all the Democratic senators and members of Congress working hard every day to block the schemes and sellouts of the Bush administration. It needed to be just a sentence or two, but it would have gotten through loud and clear to Daschle's office (thence to the offices of other Washington insiders) that Dean was firing up the peace pipe.
Stump speeches matter. John Edwards rejiggered his as the Iowa caucuses approached, and so did John Kerry. Those changes obviously aren't 100 percent responsible for their respective surges, but I have no doubt they're strongly correlated to the two men's successes. They'd picked up on the mood. Dean hadn't.
So now he limps into New Hampshire doing what he should have done three weeks ago, with a new speech that's meant to show us a new Dean. But whereas three weeks ago the transition to the mellow, substantive Dean would have come across as interesting and ingeniously ahead of the curve yet again, now he just looks sort of desperate.
Meanwhile, no one who wants to see George W. Bush removed from Pennsylvania Avenue can disagree that the Iowa surprise was, on the whole, a grand thing. This primary process really does seem to be one in which each of the major candidates has learned some important lessons and gotten better. Kerry is a much more focused stump speaker now than he was six months ago. Edwards has honed a message that's substantive and that people obviously find compelling. We'll see Wesley Clark's road show close up this week, but we already know he's a smarter candidate than he was last November. And however Dean ends up, all the others have learned from him that the liberal base is important, and that winning isn't only about shaving off 3 percent more among moderates in the center.
Now, and probably for a while yet, the White House won't know which opponent to focus on. Each serious Democratic candidate has a unique set of strengths, and Bush, who just delivered what even some conservatives agree was his worst State of the Union address, has identifiable weaknesses. Yes, he's got Karl Rove. But is it maybe just possible that Rove is a little overly feared? After all, he's directed two elections. The first one (2000) he lost by half a million votes; and in the second one (2002), his candidate was operating against essentially no Democratic opposition. Whatever happens in New Hampshire and beyond, we know that this time, that won't be the case.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's co-editor and executive editor.
