Is Hillary Going to Get the Dean Treatment?

Remember Howard Dean? He was the great white hope of the 2004 Dem campaign for president. The netroots (or nutroots) loved him and raised great sums of money on his behalf, and he was the sure bet for the nomination...until the Dem voters came to their senses and realized that he couldn't possibly win against Bush. Add his "I Have a Scream" moment in Iowa, and his campaign sank faster than the post-iceberg Titanic.

Hillary Clinton may be in the first phases of her coming Dean treatment. She's considered the odds-on favorite to win the nomination, but more and more Dem political experts and voters in general are beginning to doubt her ability to win the general election. If you heard her big speech yesterday at the New York Dem convention, the doubts should grow ever larger. She's a truly grating public speaker, and I'd hate to think we'd have to hear her screeching on the news every night.

Howard Fineman writes today on MSNBC.com about the candidacy of Sen. Chris Dodd, and the doubts people are starting to express about Hillary:

Maybe Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut has no chance to win the presidency. Or maybe he does. In any case, the mere fact that he called me the other day to remind me that he is running tells me something: that most of the Democratic Party's savviest veterans—elected officials in their Capitol Hill suites, Hollywood machers tooling along the Santa Monica Freeway in their Priuses, the New York soft-money crowd eating their egg-white omelets at the Regency in Manhattan—are convinced that Hillary Can’t Win.

I don't think Dodd has a prayer, but he may become the reasonably sane alternative in much the same way Kerry did in '04.