You Don’t Have To Win To Win

If you were to describe in one word the Democrats fantasizing they can beat Bush in November, you would say Dean is a hothead, Clark an egomaniac, Sharpton a hustler, Edwards an ambulance-chaser, Kucinch a kook, Lieberman a moderate, and Kerry…?

The word that Democrats want to apply to Kerry is “electable.”  What does this mean?  Exactly nothing, for that’s all he is — that somehow he possesses some magical capacity to defeat GW.

The truth is that John Kerry isn’t from Massachusetts.  He’s from Oakland, California — because Gertrude Stein’s observation of Oakland applies so accurately to him: 

“The problem with Oakland is that there is no there there.”

 There is no there in John Kerry’s soul.  Take most any position he’s embraced over his 19 years in the Senate, and you’ll find at some point he embraced the opposite.  As Winston Churchill would say, Kerry is a pudding without a theme.

All you really need to know about this guy’s character is that in 1971 at an Anti-Vietnam War Rally, he publicly threw away someone else’s medals pretending they were his, and now displays his actual medals on a wall in his office.  Integrity is not his strong suit.

However “electable” Kerry may be, he is far, far from having the nomination sewn up.  Try on this question:  Despite all the banner headlines proclaiming Kerry to have “won” in New Hampshire and Iowa, how come Howard Dean has more delegates than John Kerry?  As of today (1/30/04,  Dean has 113 to Kerry’s 94.

That’s because the Democrat  Primaries were designed by Rube Goldberg.  If you’re a Democrat, you don’t have to win to win.

In the Republican Primaries, or the Presidential Electoral College, the candidate who wins a plurality of the votes in each state gets all the delegates, or electors, for that state.  It’s winner-take-all.  But the Democrats do it proportionally.  When John Kerry got 38% of the vote in New Hampshire, he didn’t “win.”  He got 38% of the New Hampshire delegates pledged to vote for him on the first ballot — only — at the Democrat Convention in July.

It gets much more complicated.  The proportionally-elected delegates only make up about half of the total convention delegates.  The rest are “at-large” delegates, “unpledged” delegates who can vote for anyone, and “PLEOS” — party leaders and elected officials — who try to play power broker.  It is entirely possible under such a contrived system that a candidate could “win” every primary with a bare plurality and yet not gain a majority of delegate votes — 2,161 — on the first ballot.

It’s not very astounding that the alphabet media ignores this complexity and just blares “Winner!”  What is amazing is that Dizzy Dean doesn’t have the brains to explain this to his passionate followers.  He hasn’t pointed out to them he’s ahead in the delegate count now, that it doesn’t matter he won’t be after the next set of primaries, that all he needs to do is win enough delegates to deny Kerry a first-ballot victory, that he doesn’t have to win primaries to win the nomination in a brokered convention.

I say this in the hope that some Dizzy staffer will read this and explain it to his boss in time for his campaign to be resuscitated.  It would be so much fun to see GW wipe the floor with Dizzy.  He will wipe the floor with Kerry too — but not nearly as entertaining.

So if you know any Deaniacs — make sure they get this.  Tell them to make sure the Dizzy Doctor knows he doesn’t have to win to win.