Looks like Hodean is going to have a rocky road on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination, if indeed he makes it at all. His third-place showing in Iowa will be hard to recover from, especially since he'd been camped out there for two years and was the odds-on favorite as recently as three weeks ago.
Senator Kerry is a better candidate for the general election, but his nomination will doom the Democrats anyway. Why? Because Hodean's supporters aren't going to campaign for a regular, boring, "establishment" guy. They wanted moxie, spunk, fire -- all of the things that Kerry does not have. The Deanie babies will be disillusioned with the election, and possibly with politics in general. That's fine by me -- I hope they're so mentally scarred by the experience that they never vote again. If they do vote, they'll probably latch onto whomever the Green Party nominates this year, which is the next-best thing.
Let me be the first one to tag Hodean as "Dot-com Dean." His candidacy has had the feel of a dot-com company circa 1997. Hodean attracted a ton of venture capital in the form of Internet donations, and his "user base" of college students and graying hippies were excited about the novelty. Yet when it came time to deliver the product, it didn't quite live up to the hype -- the rollout was fraught with gaffes, and the target market didn't embrace it wholeheartedly. The established "brick and mortar" candidates learned from his mistakes and swept him from the field.
Howard Dean: the Pets.com of Election 2004.
Nice. Gonna link to your analysis from my blog.
Good. But I don't think that the harm to Kerry from disgruntled Deanie Babies will be as great as you suggest. Those that would stay home or vote Green/Nader-indy would probably have done so anyway, had Dean never run. And Kerry, you'll remember, opted out of campaign spending limits, which will give him a significant advantage over all his rival vis-a-vis general election viability. Bush needs to run this race all the way through like he's ten points behind a week before election day. Arrogance is his greatest enemy in this election.
Actually, I would call him the DrKoop.com of Election 2004.
Another good comparison. But not as many people remember that site -- I don't think it ever had a Super Bowl commercial, did it?
Yeah, plus the pets.com people actually sued Conan O'Brien over Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in perhaps a last-grasp effort to infuse their company with cash.
A desperate maneuver employing trial lawyers and built on the basis of personal irresponsibility. How very Democratic of them.
At least the voice/hand of the pets.com sock puppet went on to bigger and better things like VH1's I Love the Eighties and a co-starring role on NBC's Ed.