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The Music Man Part Two

If you are unfamiliar with Meredith Wilson's play, a moment of review. A shyster, Harold Hill, rolls into River City selling band equippment to the local high school. Never mind that he gets into an unexpected romance and ends up never leaving Iowa. While the play premiered in the 1950s, it was set in 1912. Strange then, that the most famous artistic work about Iowa was against the background of one of the most important elections in US history. Wilson won Iowa that year, but as you may know, there were no large scale caucuses and instead only the Democratic Convention in Baltimore.

Of course, everyone is still trying to figure out just what happened. It boils down to this. Gephardt and Dean slipped out of place going negative at the wrong time. Not that the week before the caucus was a bad time, but rather don't go negative when you leave the state and rest your popularity in the hands of the television producers. Add to that a strange deal first reported by Terry Neal of the Washington Post that apparently Kucinich wanted to send his caucus goers to Edwards assuming he couldn't win in any districts. So as a result, many of the Gephardt people probably defected to Kerry and some of Dean's more populist adherent's probably joined Kerry or Edwards. But let's face another reality, the line up doesn't matter. Each of the top three candidates got delegates and as a result, each walks away from Iowa in good shape. Image-wise each may have to do some retooling, but even those who though Kerry's victory hurt Dean should realize Dean wanted a good showing by Kerry and Edwards. He wanted them becuase he wanted to split the "pro-war" vote. In New Hampshire this will be much easier to do, since it's a primary, not a caucus. Kerry remains dangerous however because if he raises enough money he will be able to compete with Dean on future dates when TV advertising will be crucial.

Of course, now look at the irony of those Club for Growth ads. They didn't knock out Dean from the top three. His core followers stuck with him and didn't trade. The make him look like a frontrunner and the face of the Democratic ticket except...if they weakened him...it now means that until New York on March 9, the campaign could go back and forth. It's also possible that there could be a good race even after that, but in order for that to happen, the candidates will have to have excellent local organizations and not just TV ads as a prelude to the general election. As for Dean: he can only lament that for the first time in his life he got his foot caught in the door.
posted by Thomas at 3:14 PM 0 comments