BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, January 26, 2004
You can bet on it: someone will
win! Media Log bravely predicts that many people will vote in the
New Hampshire primary tomorrow, that there will be a winner, and that
there will be losers.
The tracking polls are all over the
place.
The American
Research Group this morning
has John Kerry ahead of Howard Dean by 18 points, which seems to
match up with what most other pollsters are reporting. Yet
Zogby
is showing a last-minute surge by Dean, who's supposedly closed
within three. Zogby's reputation is for being either spectacularly
right or dreadfully wrong, which doesn't exactly help in figuring out
what's going on. Regardless of the final tally, Dean does seem to
have recovered somewhat from his third-place finish in Iowa and The
Scream, which, idiotic though it was, struck me as more of a media
obsession than anything real.
Given such volatility, the best
analysis you can read today is this,
by David Rosenbaum in the New York Times, who shows why polls
in New Hampshire are worthless.
No surprise, but it's nevertheless
impressive the way Kerry was thrown on the defensive the moment he
regained his long-lost front-runner status. The attacks have been
flying since last week. Can we look forward to a revival of last
summer's Great
Cheez Whiz scandal? For my
money, the Times' Todd Purdum does the best
job of explaining what
Kerry can look forward to if he holds his lead. The problem is that
Kerry has been a senator for 19 years. It's hardly a shock that he
would have cast some votes that he might wish he hadn't, and cast
others that seem contradictory.
I think his votes against the Gulf
War of 1991 and in favor of the war in Iraq in 2002 are going to be particularly difficult to explain in a sound bite. I mean, it can be
done: the 1991 resolution was for war, right then, with no further
negotiations or peace-seeking efforts; the 2002 resolution laid out a
series of steps that George W. Bush was supposed to take before
invading Iraq. But try making a good case for consistency when you've
got Tim Russert yapping in your face. (Here
is how Kerry tried to explain it in Nashua yesterday.)
For instance, at the Weekly
Standard you can already read Fred
Barnes's gloss on Purdum. A
better headline: "Anti-Kerry Talking Points for Idiots."
Anyway, Media Log is currently in
NH overload. Too much to read! Too little time! Former Boston
Globe columnist John
Ellis is back to blogging
regularly. His anti-Kerry stuff is well worth reading, not only
because he's smart, but because it may reflect what The Cousins are
thinking.
And if you didn't catch it, you can
watch Kerry's interview on 60 Minutes here.
My verdict: presidential but cold, even with the show of emotion over
Vietnam and with the presence of his wife, Teresa Heinz. Is Oprah
Nation ready for a president who doesn't double as First Pal?
posted at 11:20 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
