HOW ABOUT "NONE OF THE ABOVE"?:

Knowns, unknowns and the Ketchup Kid (Mark Steyn, 27/01/2004, Daily Telegraph)

Here's my sense of how things will go today, based on nothing more scientific than a weekend winter-sports break over on the eastern side of the state and a chat with the waitress in the Littleton Diner on the way back to my pad in western New Hampshire. She'd had pretty much every candidate host events at the diner except Dean and Lyndon Larouche, whose campaign wanted to hold a shindig there but got turned down. Larouche is the guy who thinks the Queen is an international drugs kingpin (or, in this case, queenpin) secretly running the world on her cocaine profits. Compared with some of the wackier utterances of Dean and Clark, the House of Windsor drug cartel is one of the less fanciful notions this primary season. At the rate the white knights are tripping over their feet of clay, Larouche could well be the frontrunner by March, with his face on the cover of Newsweek and a poll showing he'd beat Bush 49 per cent to 46 per cent, if Prince Philip doesn't have him taken out by a hit team first.

But, barring a Larouche surge, my bet for today's vote is as follows:

1) Senator John Kerry 29 per cent
2) Governor Howard Dean 28 per cent
3) Senator John Edwards 19 per cent
4) Senator Joe Lieberman 12 per cent
5) General Wesley Clark 10 per cent
6) Everybody else 2 per cent

You can have a good laugh about these predictions tomorrow morning.

Especially after the debate the other night, it looked like the electability mantle had descended on Mr. Kerry so completely that he could walk with this thing, and he still may. But if Howard Dean really is reclosing the gap on him it would be a stunning demonstratio of just how weak a candidate the Senator is--unable to stand just four days of press scrutiny and frontrunner attention. General Clark having shown himself to be unelectable too, John Edwards may be the next big thing as we head to his birth state of South Carolina.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2004 08:17 PM