Kerry has been my fallback candidate for months now, but I haven't watched a whole lot of him lately, because I'm hoping not to fall back.

But I just watched the last hour of the Philly debate. (CSPAN said they would rebroadcast it at approximately 10:45 PM EDT (7:45PM PDT). If you're interested in these in the future, the Dean blog is always posting about when they're coming up, and provides a link to watch the CSPAN web broadcast. I couldn't find it on my cable, but got it easily that way.) I hope he (Kerry) was having an off night. Sure struck me like a pompous windbag. Didn't come across as someone telling me what he thinks so much as a bad actor trying to deliver hokum he thinks will sound presidential.

Blech!

The others sounded real, aside from Gephardt, of course (and Edwards was missing).

Maybe it was just a bad night. Many of the Deaniacs commenting on the Dean blog thought the doctor was a bit tired and subpar as well. Maybe. I guess I'll have to start watching more TV. Is that possible?

What was the appeal of this Kerry guy again? He fought in Vietnam, that's great. What was the rest?

I just finished the three-hour PBS special "The Spartans."

Wow. Very interesting stuff. I learned just about all of that in college, but I wasn't ready to let go of my romanticism of the culture at the time. I guess I am now. Heeheehee. Grudgingly, apparently. It's tough, though, because they built a fascinating culture.

But I couldn't help thinking about how remote my chances of succeeding would have been there. Same for just about everyone else. Pretty damn oppressive for more than 90 percent of the population. And exactly one choice of vocation if you wanted any chance at citizenship. No thanks.

Surprising/ironic to see how well they treated the women, though. Even while they were oppressing so many of the men, life was infinitely better there for women than almost anywhere else--including and especially that cradle of democracy in Athens.

PBS loves repeating their shows endlessly, so look for it when it comes around again.

Yes, that header is a gross overstatement, but no sooner did Biden bow out than the blogs started crackling with conjecture about the last big open question that we know of: Will General Wesley Clark run?

And if he does, will it tear the Democratic race wide open, or is he too unknown, too inexperienced arriving way too late in the race?

DailyKos posed the Clark question and a fascinating discussion erupted in the comments section. Check them out.

My two cents:

I continue to believe that Clark may or may be arriving too late to win, but he is the one person with a legitimate chance to blow things open and/or seriously challenge Dean. (Though Dean could still self-destruct.)

Clark does excite people, breed true believers, much like Dean. They're the only two people the electorate has any chance of falling in love with, so they are the two best challengers for Bush. And the two most likely to get the nom.

Like Dean, his appeal is not based on a perfect fit on the issues. Dean is a moderate who has attracted hordes of liberals--and moderates and some conservatives--because they respond to his candor, directness, charisma, wisdom, enthusiasm and courage in boldly calling Bush on his failings, as opposed to the simpering Dem response we've seen for years. Those are exactly the same qualities that have attracted Clark's evangelical following.

A lot of liberal Dems--including me--were fawning all over John McCain four years ago because he had those qualities, even though he has an extremely conservative voting record. After the jerks we've had, honesty, integrity, wisdom and candor trump everything else.

I'm pretty damn confident Gep and Lieb aren't suddenly going to raise an army. No one will EVER get excited about them. Kerry and Edwards, maybe. I doubt it, but maybe. But I don't see any of them exploding like Clark could.
But . . .

Clark is about a year late in building a small band of evangelists into a mass army. But you never know. At least it's plausible. I just can't see Lieb or Gephardt ever winning much of the public over under any scenario.

I guess it comes down to this: Clark could either erupt or fail to erupt. At least eruption is a possibility. The Eight Dwarves are never going to ignite anything: all they can hope for is for Dean to fail, so we have to get stuck with one of them.

(Note: This post belongs a few lower down, introducing the others on Clark, but I managed to delete it, so now it's here.)

A person named Taff has posted an interesting scenario on DailyKos's discussion of a possible Clark run:

Plausible Clark playbook:

Clark is leaking "family pressures' to avoid much-ado speculation as to the delay of said announcement.

September announcement is tandem with new book debut, which will probably focus on Bush leadership failures and how he would have handled things differently in Iraq, etc. (i.e. platform).

Book debut gets him on Oprah.

He shoots, he scores!

Huh. Sounds plausible. With or without all those little machinations, though, it seems likely he'll combine the two if he is running. Would be silly not to.  (And if he cynical and not, he would hold off the announcement to milk the speculation throughout his book tour. But I don't think he is that cynical.) Great piggybacking: the book tour gets him more exposure on more "soft" shows that wouldn't lavish much time on a political announcement, and the exposure on the political show helps the book, which generates more true believers, which . . .

And I could totally see an Oprah announcement.

I'm not sure of the exact pub date. Amazon only says Sept. Those dates are highly fungible. Most books actually ship a week or two before the official pub date. And if he went to Public Affairs (his publisher) and said he could quadruple the book exposure by moving up the pub date a few weeks, the presses would be rolling within the hour.

Could be a very interesting September.

There's a big blog discussion afoot about whether a Clark run now would help or hinder a veep shot, which may or may not be his true intention. My conjecture:

I think a veep shot might be the biggest draw pulling him in. His thinking could go: I've got a long shot at actually winning the nom, and stranger things have happened. More likely I lose, but I solidify my veep spot in the process. Win-win.

The way I figure, he's on anybody's short list next summer, especially Dean's, where he's the natural compliment to the peacenik crap and legitimate foreign policy weakness. The big downside will be that he's completely untested. What if he totally sucks at campaigning, gets riled debates, fails to draw crowds or keep them, etc.? A couple months of campaigning that show real promise is just the proof he needs, even if he fails to break out because he's too unknown too late.

I also think the public can be just a little queasy about a complete neophyte on the ticket. Or the press will assume such queasiness and write about it incessantly. Running now won't give Clark experience in office, but it will wear off his new-guy image. He'll at least have been a viable presidential candidate; that changes everything.

Jonathan Alter reported a week ago in Newsweek that Biden and Clark were leaning toward running for pres. Biden just announced he would not: NYT, AP.

"At this late date, everything would have to fall perfectly into place and I would have to put on hold what influence I have in the United States Senate in pursuit of what is now too much of a long shot," Biden said in a prepared statement.

Can you hear the squeals of joy rattling out of Burlington and especially Boston? I think Dean would have ultimately beaten back Biden, but he sure could have thrown a wrench in. I think Biden would have been his strongest challenger by far.

And his entrance might have been the death-knell to Kerry: splitting the same group of supporters looking for a mainstream candidate with Senate stature and roughly similar persona. Kerry has had trouble generating excitement, and the people who have backed him as most electable may well have bolted.

Now the big question remains Clark. Hard to say what this will do to his entry. It's one fewer big-name competitor sharing the field and the new-entrant press, which could be a big deal. (Either one entering would hope to generate a lot of media interest as the late-arrival suddenly stirring up the race. With Biden in, he would have to split that attention in half.)

And with eight candidates so far failing to arouse the public, a new guy could try (over time) to fashion it into a two-man contest: Dean and him, the two guys who had proven able to rally supporters. (That would work only if Clark managed to do so, of course; but if he fails to, he's dead, so it doesn't matter who is in the race.) I could really see that playing out, potentially. I could see either Biden and or Clark possibly arousing a base of support, in sharp contrast to the eight dwarves. But both of them together, plus Dean, plus the dwarves, that's mighty crowded.

The flipside, though, is how this might effect Clark's personal thinking. Say he was leaning toward the plunge, and then Biden comes out and says it's too late, and a total longshot. Hmmmmm. This from a ranking Senator with relatively high name recognition and proven money-raising ability. Makes his left-field attempt look even more like windmills.

But then again, Biden has more to lose. He's risking his senate career, or at least risking tarnishing it, especially when those ugly reports that forced him out in 1988 resurface. (AP's story refers to "allegations," but they were well-documented: "Biden entered the 1988 presidential race, but quit in September 1987 after his campaign was rocked by allegations of plagiarism in some of his speeches and false claims about his academic achievements.") As far as I know, Wes Clark is unemployed, isn't he?

I sure hope Clark jumps in. I would love to see what he can do. And it might also increase his chances for a Dean/Clark ticket, particularly if Clark demonstrates a strong following of his own, an ability to raise money, etc. And it would give him the experience campaigning, and make him appear like a more realistic pres-replacement, having run personally. Run General, run!

We have to watch so much crap make millions, it's nice now and then to watch crap splatter.

I have not seen Gigli, nor do I intend to, but I have seen both its awful stars, and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that it's 3% Rotten Tomatoes rating (among cream of the crop) is justified. From boxofficeguru (try to ignore the writing style):

Sony's Ben-and-Jen pic Gigli experienced what could be the worst second-weekend fall in history collapsing 83% to a pitiful $640,000, according to estimates. The $54M comedy, which the press loves to hate, averaged an embarrassing $289 per theater and has grossed a pathetic $5.6M in ten days. Look for theater owners to dump their Gigli prints as soon as contractually possible as the year's most notorious flop should find its way to only $6-7M.

Wow, $289 per theater over the three-day weekend. That means under $100 per day, maybe $40 for each of the main showings per night ($20 for the rest of the day combined). At $8/ticket (in an average market), that's five people per screening at the prime showing times. Maybe zero to one for a matinee. Imagine showing up with a date and three other people on Saturday night at 7:30. Don't you think you'd look around and say, "Hmmmmm. Maybe we should start reading those reviews after all."

A few announcements:

A site called The Working Poor Picnic is rounding up support and volunteer time for the working poor. Dean supporters have been asked to show their support, as part of the campaign's project to do public service by volunteers. (Now I can't remember what that's called.)

On a much less selfless note, if you live anywhere near Denver, local bloggers will be gathering for the second annual drunkfest of the year (sic) this Saturday, at the flagship bar owned by our new mayor. (Yes, we just elected a bar owner mayor. Overwhelmingly.) Details here.

I know, I know, it's been way more than a week, and you must be jonesing for some Nabokov, so I'll make it a good one. From the first chapter of Conclusive Evidence, one of his earliest memories:

Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother’s birthday, in late summer, in the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the answers I received.

I was given a tremendously invigorating shock. As if subjected to a second baptism, on more divine lines than the Greek Catholic ducking undergone fifty months earlier by a howling, half-drowned half-Victor, I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it—just as excited bathers share shining seawater—with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. At that instant, I became acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold, holding my right hand, was my father. . . . ; but now my father’s attire, the resplendent uniform of the Horse Guards, with that smooth golden swell of cuirass burning upon his chest and back, came out like the sun, and for several years afterward I remained keenly interested in the age of my parents and kept myself informed about, like a nervous passenger asking the time in order to check a new watch.

To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete conciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.

I don't know about you, but I liked it, liked it, suddenly fell in love with it as he got to the resplendent uniform with the golden cuirass burning upon his chest and back and coming out like the sun. Then the switch to its effect on him, watching his parents like a nervous passenger--just makes my heart ache.

How will I ever top that?