Manchester, New Hampshire

ONE MONDAY MORNING a couple weeks ago in Des Moines, I was standing toward the back of a YMCA meeting room on the city’s south suburban rim talking insider gossip guesswork stuff with my peers and betters from the visiting Washington media mafia. And I was faintheartedly trying to explain why and how, yes, I still thought it possible–possible, at least–that Howard Dean could win a general election campaign against President Bush. There’d been a time, and not so long before, as I remember, when I could more or less routinely carry off this argument–even with people, not all of them Republicans or conservatives, who wanted very badly to disbelieve it. But that time was gone. Now, already–this was January 5–I was having an awful lot of trouble making a theoretical case for “Dean Beats Bush” to a group of professional political analysts who had no particular rooting interest one way or another. And now, already, Dean himself was having an awful lot of trouble making the same case, on his own behalf, even to deeply partisan Democratic audiences for whom “anybody but Bush” was practically religious dogma. Just the day before, for example, there’d been that Des Moines Register-sponsored debate during which Dean got barely half a sentence into some answer about what he’d do during the “sixth or seventh year of my administration”–and then faltered and had to stop, incredulous and distressed, when a fair chunk of the audience started laughing at him.
Anyhow, as I say, I was standing there in that YMCA, reminding my friends that November was a long ways off, and the American political landscape remained closely divided, and Democrats were united against Bush, and things could get even stickier in Iraq, and Howard Dean was a mighty talented and canny guy, and whatnot–so, sure, I still thought he could get himself elected. I got all the way to the end of this spiel and nobody started laughing at me. But when I was done, I couldn’t help noticing that several unquestionably distinguished pillars of American journalism–among the most politically sophisticated people in the world–were looking at me like I’d just admitted I was a heroin addict or something.