Newsweek confidently posts Jonathan Alter’s don’t-make-predictions column, but this piece’s predictions might look silly months from now:
When you buy Tupperware, you get Teflon, too. (He’s referring meatphorically to the many Dean meetups.) Normally, gaffes stick to a candidate and dry up money. Dean has reversed that. Every time he runs into trouble, his backers give more. It’s almost a form of human insurance.
For months, the other candidates have tried to derail the Dean Machine. John Kerry calls him a flip-flopper. Joe Lieberman warns that Dean is in danger of being isolated on the left on national security, trade and spiritual values. John Edwards explains that optimism, not anger, wins presidential elections, a point borne out by the failure of populist campaigns to ever win the White House. (FDR, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton all ousted GOP incumbents with smiles, not scowls.) These arguments may be true, but they aren’t likely to be relevant in the primaries…