The Democratic Nomination Fraud

     I'd like to turn your minds back a moment, to the Democrat's primary process, which winnowed the field down from nine or ten candidates to one, that one being the nominee, John Forbes Kerry.

     Being realistic, or limiting the discussion to those candidates who won statewide polls on more than a single occasion, we are talking about Clark, Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, Kerry and Lieberman.  Examinations of all the state polls available to me via DKos and personal e-mails with Markos, I graphically represented the polls using the most sophisticated representation scheme I so-far yet seen, somewhat surprisingly, one I programmed myself.  But first, let's backtrack.

     To lay the cards on the table, I became a Dean supporter because of the war in Iraq, and even went to Dean meet-ups on a couple of occasions.  Then I volunteered for a few weeks for the Dean campaign in Manchester, New Hampshire.  Afterwards I briefly volunteered for their office in Manhattan.

     After Iowa and New Hampshire losses to Kerry, like many Dean supporters, I was left wondering what happened, but there was more, since I had been watching quite closely.  I was a full-time observer, having quit my job the day the Iraq War began.  Of course, at the most obvious level, the 100s time repeated (always out of context) "scream" was what destroyed the campaign.  It wasn't so much, to all viewers, that the scream itself was bad, it was the media's insistence on repeating it, as if it were most important happening on the face of the planet.  This left the less educated voter in a position of thinking "Hmm, maybe the media is trying to say Dean is unbalanced, without actually being that impolite."

     Is that all that happened, though?  How did Dean surprise the Democratic establishment and do so well in the first place?  Why did his support emerge from the internet, even though his supporters were not the most internet-connected of all the candidates?  The answer to the first question I blogged before, to recap, the war was supported by all the mainstream media, and so Dean's anti-war stance was forced to emerge somewhere else.  My answer to the second question puts me firmly in the conspiracy theory camp.  Simply put, FOX and the Wall St. Journal want Bush to win...

     In the early days of the war, who believed WMD existed in Saddam's arsenal?  Not I.  And even though I didn't believe it, I was still worried as our troops rolled into Baghdad.  Just because I knew the adminstration had been deceiving the corporate news machines, and/or the corporate news machines were part of the active deception matrix, did not mean that some weapon had not been secretly developed, however unlikely.  Luckily for the troops, and the world in general, no WMD were used in the defense of Iraq.  But, as the corporate media repeatedly ran to the presses with breathless stories that the WMD had been found, and then later, if ever, embarassedly reported their early stories had been debunked, the truth started sinking into even the hardest of heads.  But if someone, like Roger Ailes, truly believed the weapons were there, of the five candidates listed, who would have been the easiest for Bush to beat?  Why, Dean, of course.  It was easy to imagine in those days the monkey-like dancing of Republicans waving Iraqi WMD under Dean's nose, perhaps uttering a "Told Ya So" for good measure.

     Yes, if you, like most Americans, had been deceieved into believing Iraqi WMD, and you wanted Bush to win, Dean was the most logical choice to surreptitiously endorse.  And how did FOX/WSJ manage to endorse Dean?  It's as simple as calling Dean an "internet phenomenon."  Dean's internet appearance became a story because the media willed it.  Now, of course, I'd be dubious if I were hearing this, so I am going to jump ahead, nine months forward, to Christmas time, less than a month before the Iowa Caucus.  Edwards had polled in first in the Carolinas, but nowhere else, Gephardt had some support in Missouri and surrounding areas in the middle of the country, but little else. Clark had done well in some polls, mostly in the West. Lieberman had done well in many more polls in the northeast than he ever got credit for winning. Dean, by this point, however, was pretty much in 1st place in every single statewide poll except where he was in 2nd place against the native son.  Dean was beating Kerry in Kerry's homestate of Massachusetts.  In fact, Kerry was ahead in zero polls as New Year's approached, coming in his best 2nd in Massachusetts against Dean's first.

     So how did the last place (not including Braun, Kucinich or Sharpton) candidate become the first place candidate in three weeks?  Simply put, FOX/WSJ made a cold calculation that goes as follows.  Clark attracts some of the military vote, and erases a lot of the leverage Bush might get for being a "war time President."  Edwards had a very loyal following, would attract women voters, and could peel some of the Southerners away from Bush's strongholds.  Gephardt had the union vote.  Unions may put most of their money and endorsements for Democrats, but union members split something like 60/40.  Recapturing those votes would be a coup across the whole country, especially with efforts involving volunteers.  Lieberman had the name recognition.  I didn't like him, because of his very conservative positions and his position on the Iraq war. Like me, the mainstream media never gave Lieberman a fair go at it.  And then there was Kerry, a smart, liberal, Taxachusetts lawyer.  What possible demographic could he add to the Democrat ticket come this November?  Answer: none.

     Dean attracted Republicans against the war, he was a Governor of a small state (which means any programs he pushed towards his home state wouldn't be big urban programs, Vermont has no cities, he was clear and outspoken on abortion.  One of the biggest things coming down the pike is government health care, and he was a Doctor.  He had had to implement the fraud "No Child Left Buttocks Act."  He had an A rating from the NRA.  He had actually talked about the Confederate Flag and pickup trucks!  And, most embarassingly, as the bigheads at FOX/WSJ were figuring out for themselves around Christmas time, he had been right about the WMD.

     No, it couldn't be Dean.  Kerry, why, why, he's "electable!"