Temporarily Assigned to Planet Earth

I like Howard Dean a lot. Really. And if he becomes the democratic candidate, I certainly will vote for him. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid of waking up on the morning after the election with that sick feeling of defeat that I've experienced so many times. So what follows here is an explanation of my fear that Dean will win the nomination. And although I'm predicting disaster if he does, I will be the happiest person on the planet if he goes on to win the general election. Even though it will mean that I was dead wrong. I'll say: yup, yup, I was really full of it, wasn't I? What a great feeling.

My father-in-law voted for Reagan because Reagan shook his hand in a parking lot one day. That was the sole reason; he seemed like a great guy. If ever a man should have been a democrat, it was my father-in-law. He worked as a parking lot attendant for thirty years. When asked about retirement he would brush it off with "Aww, the company will take care of me." This quaint belief in the largesse of "the company" was an idea he apparently brought with him when he moved to this country from England at the age of 17. As it turned out, the company that owned and operated the parking lots he attended did nothing to "take care of him"-- he lived on social security after his retirement.

And yet, he voted for Reagan. Twice. And he voted for Bush Sr., because there was no freaking way he would ever have voted for the puny wimp who ran against him.

My late husband voted for Reagan because Reagan was ahead in the polls on Election Day. His reasoning was "I figured he was going to win anyway, so I voted for him as a show of support." I believe the real motivation was fear: fear of voting for a loser and thus becoming a loser himself by proxy. And so his voting strategy was to make up his mind at the last minute, based on the polls.

We all know that Bush will get a good turnout from his base, and that the democratic candidate will have to match that. And we know that the democratic base is racially diverse and that the candidate will have to get strong support from the minority community to win.

But aside from the loyal democratic and republican voters, there is a vast pool of voters who are up for grabs, and who vote for stupid reasons. You don't hear strategists or commentators say this, but they know it. There are voters who vote for the tallest candidate because they don't want our president to be dwarfed by foreign leaders. There are voters who vote for whoever is ahead in the polls because they want to feel like members of the winning team. There are voters who will simply choose the candidate who seems like a great guy. To win this pool of voters a candidate has to be likable, optimistic, tall, and have good hair. When was the last time we had a short president? A bald president? A president who wore glasses in public? Not since the invention of TV.

If a candidate appeals to this pool of voters and gets the solid support of the party base, he'll win. The republicans figured this out, which is why they chose a candidate who is laughably unqualified, but gee, isn't he a great guy? I'm sure I'm no more cynical than Karl Rove, who, as he was stuffing the front of Dubya's flight suit, was probably humming this little ditty:

One extra sock
For one percent more
Of the popular vote
In 2004

We know that Dean has the passionate support of a segment of the white portion of the democratic base-- people who wouldn't vote for Bush if the two names on the ballot were Bush and Darth Vader. Maybe he can win over the minority community, if he chooses his vp well. But what about the "undecideds"? Given a choice between Bush and Dean, it's Bush by a landslide.