Electability, schmelectability. Todd Purdum seems to have a habit of getting carried away with his own rhetoric. Couldn't some kind editor have pulled him aside and suggested that the beginning of his news analysis piece this morning ("In Next Round, No Certainties," a Web headline different and more accurate than the "First Primary: A Bit of Redux" that appears in my print edition) bordered on the fatuous?

John Kerry has now done what none of his rivals for the Democratic nomination have yet come close to doing: He has won twice. Decisively.

See, Todd, it kind of stands to reason that since there have only been two primaries so far, mathematically nobody but the winner of those two primaries really could have come close to the feat of ... winning two primaries. But Todd's got his eye on a telling parallelism, which he completes in the next graf:

Howard Dean has now failed twice, decisively, in the states where he has worked hardest, with the voters who know him best, even among those who share his signature issue: opposition to the war in Iraq.

Where we have a decisive winner, we must of course have a decisive loser—though there's a great deal of room to question how "decisive" a strong, rebound second-place finish is for a candidate who looked all but dead in the water a week ago. Not to mention that Purdum's very next graf implies, correctly, that there's still something of a contest here:

As the campaign shifts from an expectations game to a fight for real delegates, Dr. Dean needs to win somewhere. There were signs that he might leapfrog to states like Michigan and Wisconsin that vote later next month, then regroup for the big contests on both coasts on March 2.

[For what it's worth, by the only numbers that matter, the delegate count, Dean remains ahead of Kerry, and picked up only four fewer delegates in NH than Kerry. Though with 2161 delegates needed to win the nomination, these early counts are all but meaningless.]

I'm not really trying to pick a fight with Todd Purdum today. What his piece does, mostly, is to confirm that the CW has coalesced around the electability meme. Kerry beats Dean because voters have started anteing in for the who-beats-Bush action:

As was the case in Iowa last week, surveys of voters leaving the polls here suggested that they chose Mr. Kerry more for his electability than for his compatibility, with 46 percent of his supporters saying they voted for him because he was the best candidate to beat Mr. Bush, compared with 42 percent who said he shared their views on the issues.

One in five voters said electability was the quality most important to them, and 60 percent of those chose Mr. Kerry. The most important quality, cited by about 30 percent of voters over all, was a candidate's standing up for his beliefs, and of those only about one-fifth picked Mr. Kerry.

So hang on a minute. The most important influencer cited by voters is "standing up for beliefs," but the story is all about the less important factor?

I guess I'm being a little tendentious here: if voters influenced by "standing up for beliefs" split their votes, while "electability" voters behaved more or less as a Kerry bloc, then "electability" may, in that sense, be the crucial factor deciding the New Hampshire outcome. But watch for the CW to treat "electability" as a magic incantation, the key to all mythologies, at least for the next little while—the real and only story about the evolving Democratic dynamic. And I think that's going to be substantially motivated by the media's evident and already richly attested discomfort with the spectacle of Democrats standing up for Democratic principles.

posted by michael  12:08:13 PM  
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