Mickey Kaus:

“The Kerry victory in Iowa reminds me, not unsurprisingly, of Gary Hart’s come-from-behind victory in New Hampshire in 1984. At the time I was working for the presidential campaign of Sen. Ernest Hollings. I’d written a profile of Hart a year earlier and decided that while somebody like Hart was the ideal Democrat, Hart himself was too strange, and his judgment too suspect, for him to be president. .. (T)he rest of the campaign did more or less correspond to a scenario in which Democrats found out more about Hart and decided ‘on second thought, no.’

I expect a similar scenario to unfold with John Kerry. The idea of John Kerry is appealing. The reality is less so (and a lot more less so than was the reality of Hart). As the primaries proceed, my guess is voters will learn more about Kerry and his support will fade…

I don’t want to commit–or rather, by predicting Kerry’s quick demise, I’ve already committed–what a Slate colleague calls the Howell Raines Fallacy, the assumption that the great and good American people, in their wisdom, will inevitably come to agree with you (or, in Raines’ case, the New York Times editorial page). It’s an easy fallacy for a democrat to slide into…” —Slate

I agree that the reality of Kerry (and I have been watching him for awhile, as the junior senator from my state about whose Presidential aspirations the Mass. media have been filled for a long time) lacks something. Who was it? Maybe Steve Gilliard, who said succinctly, “There’s just no there there.” But he is not the candidate; Kaus’ ’62-38 defeat’ line is, as usual for him, pure contrarian, but he is serving a useful function in pointing out that a bandwagon effect around the results of the byzantine Iowa caucus would be, to say the least, ill-advised and premature. And in warning the Democrats not to take any support for granted.