The Return of the Deaniacs?

Jonathan Chait does a little handicapping of the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination in today's L.A. Times:

Let's begin with Howard Dean. Most of us thought that Dean's spectacular defeat in the Iowa caucuses last January meant the end of him and his movement. Instead, it was more like the ending to "Terminator 2," where the evil robot is blasted to smithereens and presumed dead, then the fragments slowly regroup and come to life. As we speak, Deaniacs are reconstituting in their yoga studios and organic juice bars, plotting — in their benevolent, cheerful but fundamentally misguided way — to make Dean the leader of the Democratic Party...

A secular Yankee like Dean is about the worst possible candidate.

Unless, of course, the alternative is Hillary Clinton. OK, maybe she wouldn't be worse than Dean. But she surely would go down in flames if she won the nomination in 2008. President Bush owed his victory in large part to cultural division. If there's anybody who incites cultural divisions, it's Hillary Clinton.

Her advisors point out that she's religious and speaks the language of Scripture. That's nice, but nobody seemed to notice it during her eight years in the national spotlight. She's painfully uncharismatic. Her only political accomplishment is that she won a Senate seat in an extremely Democratic state, where she ran six percentage points behind Al Gore. Clinton's supporters like to note that she's not as liberal as people think. That's exactly the problem. I can see the logic behind nominating a liberal whom voters see as moderate. Nominating a moderate whom voters see as liberal is kind of backward, isn't it?

Probably the only worse option than Dean or Clinton, short of nominating Paris Hilton, would be to renominate John Kerry, who, reports have suggested, inexplicably harbors ambitions of running again in 2008. In a previous column I compared Kerry's contribution to his own campaign to an anchor's contribution to a boat race. In retrospect, I seem to have given him far too much credit.

It came out last week that Kerry ended his campaign with about $16 million left in the bank. It's unclear whether this was some kind of misconceived strategy to save money for a possible future run or, more likely, whether it was simply ineptitude on a mind-boggling scale. There's a lot a campaign could have done with $16 million. Maybe, you know, spend some of it in Ohio.

In his defense, a Kerry spokesman told the Boston Globe, "John Kerry raised more money than any Democratic nominee in history, and he gave more money to Democratic candidates across the country than any other nominee in history." Somehow this failed to mollify outraged Democrats. (Think of all the company funds former Tyco head L. Dennis Kozlowski didn't spend on himself.) So Kerry then agreed to "donate a substantial portion" of the unspent funds to Democrats. A substantial portion? After failing to spend it on what he called "the most important election of our lifetimes"? How about all of it, plus selling off some vacation homes and donating the proceeds, and then disappearing from public view forever?