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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (25250)	1/20/2004 6:50:44 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 793715

Iowans Reject Kerry! kf commits the Raines Fallacy, repents. By Mickey Kaus Posted Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2004, at 1:30 AM PT Iowans Reject Kerry by 62-38 Margin! The Kerry victory in Iowa reminds me, not unsurprisingly, of Gary Hart's come-from-behind victory in New Hampshire in 1984. At the time I was working for the presidential campaign of Sen. Ernest Hollings. I'd written a profile of Hart a year earlier and decided that while somebody like Hart was the ideal Democrat, Hart himself was too strange, and his judgment too suspect, for him to be president. On the day of the New Hampshire primary I found myself standing outside a polling place in Salem, N.H., next to an enthusiastic young Hart worker. A Hart "surge" was clearly happening, although none of us knew its magnitude until that evening. I turned to the happy Hart guy next to me and said something like "You know, Hart looks good at first glance, but as people know him more I'm not sure they'll like him." I immediately felt like an ass for declaring that I knew something about Hart that he didn't. But the rest of the campaign did more or less correspond to a scenario in which Democrats found out more about Hart and decided "on second thought, no.". I expect a similar scenario to unfold with John Kerry. The idea of John Kerry is appealing. The reality is less so (and a lot more less so than was the reality of Hart). As the primaries proceed, my guess is voters will learn more about Kerry and his support will fade. But it might not happen! I don't want to commit--or rather, by predicting Kerry's quick demise, I've already committed--what a Slate colleague calls the Howell Raines Fallacy, the assumption that the great and good American people, in their wisdom, will inevitably come to agree with you (or, in Raines' case, the New York Times editorial page). It's an easy fallacy for a democrat to slide into--and on the issue I spent most time on, welfare reform, it wasn't a fallacy at all. (Over generations, voters never liked the old welfare system, and they were right.) But of course voters make mistakes all the time. I obviously think Iowa Democrats just made a big one. It's up to the citizens of New Hampshire, who presumably know Kerry better, to correct Iowa's error. If they don't--well, one of us is wrong! slate.msn.com