There Is No Election
Says Eric Alterman:
We think Kerry is the best qualified of all major candidates to be president and also the one with the most consistently progressive record. But we share the stated view of most primary voters that at this moment of maximum national peril, we think it an unaffordable luxury right now to worry too much about who would be the best president if it’s someone who is never going to be president. We prefer someone who will be elected president, and we’ll worry about their imperfections and ideological deviations at some future date.
This line of thinking is best explained by David Brooks here:
These weird things didn’t really bother Democratic primary voters, but primary voters imagined they might bother general election swing voters. And since electability is all about Iowa and New Hampshire liberals trying to imagine what Palm Beach County, Fla., independents will want in a presidential candidate nine months from now, this created ripples of concern that Dean might not be so electable after all….
And, what do you know, Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, and from that moment on the election turned into a postmodernist literary critic’s idea of heaven. It became an election about itself, with voters voting on the basis of who could win votes later on.
Sigh.