Primary analysis continued

I was going to post some thoughts, but Will Saletan pretty much wrote what I was thinking (link via RealClearPolitics: First Clark squashed Edwards’ official campaign kickoff in September, leaking word that very day that he would get into the race. Then, a week ago, Clark beat out Edwards for third in New Hampshire by ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

I was going to post some thoughts, but Will Saletan pretty much wrote what I was thinking (link via RealClearPolitics:

I was going to post some thoughts, but Will Saletan pretty much wrote what I was thinking (link via RealClearPolitics:

First Clark squashed Edwards’ official campaign kickoff in September, leaking word that very day that he would get into the race. Then, a week ago, Clark beat out Edwards for third in New Hampshire by a fraction of a percentage point. That cost Edwards the ability to claim plausibly that he had continued his momentum from Iowa. Tuesday night, it happened again: Clark eked out a margin over Edwards in Oklahoma so narrow that the state election board will have to review the ballots before declaring an official winner…. I think Edwards would be the strongest Democrat in the general election. Nobody expected him to do this well in Oklahoma. But when the history of the 2004 race is written, my guess is that we’ll look back at Oklahoma as Edwards’ Stalingrad. He had to kill off Clark. The media were itching to write off Clark, and a no-win night would have given them license to do so. Now they can’t. Clark will go on to Tennessee and Virginia, where he’ll do what he did in Oklahoma: split the non-Yankee vote and keep Kerry in the lead. Maybe Edwards will win Tennessee and Virginia, and Clark will fade. But by then it may too late to stop Kerry…. Kerry’s biggest achievement is that he’s now the only candidate who’s running strong everywhere. I winced when he claim to have finished “enormously close” to Edwards in South Carolina; I don’t recall Kerry aides treating Dean’s finish in New Hampshire, which was nearer to the top than Kerry’s finish was in South Carolina, as enormously close. But Kerry legitimately pointed out that he’s the only candidate who campaigned in all seven of the Feb. 3 states, and he won five of them. Who else can make such a claim?

John Kerry is doing well, and the candidate deserves some credit. However, he’s also benefiting from some unbelievable luck. Richard Gephardt, in his last moment on the national stage, drags Howard Dean down with him. Now it looks like Clark will do the same thing to Edwards.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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