BLAME IOWA: BoiFromTroy is imagining what the election would be like if Dick Gephardt were the nominee. At the very least, the bumper stickers would be amusing. . . .

Let’s imagine what today’s election would be like if Gephardt were the nominee:

The Democratic Convention would have focused on issues, not a 35 year-old war.

There would have been no Swift Boat vets.

There would have been no debate over whether serving in the National Guard were honorable or if it was tantamount to being a deserter (both Bush and Dick served in the Guard during Vietnam)

There would have been no Rather-Gate/Forged Memos to distract the American people from Iraq, etc.

On the whole, John Kerry has been a distraction from his own campaign. Because of him and his need to focus on four months of his biography, the American people have been denied an honest debate about the issues that we would have had, if only Iowans would have picked Dick.

But I think he’s onto something. I agree with Hugh Hewitt that the candidate is a big problem:

Kerry’s problem is that he is simply the worst major party candidate of my lifetime, period running against a likeable incumbent backed by a growing economy and a record of bold action in the global war on terrorism.

Yeah. You’ve never seen me sing the praises of George W. Bush the way that, say, Andrew Sullivan was doing at one point. I think he’s okay, and he at least takes seriously the notion that we’re at war, and he seems steady, and not flighty. But overall, really, I give him a B. Maybe a B-. Trouble for the Democrats is that they’ve nominated a guy who gets — at the very most charitable — a weak gentleman’s C.

I’m not crazy about Gephardt, especially on trade, but he takes the war seriously and he seems steady and not flighty, too.

The Democrats’ problem is that the base, which, like bases do, cares mostly about emotional returns, wanted Howard Dean. But the leadership, which, like leaderships do, cares about status and connections and thus about winning, knew that Dean couldn’t win. They tried to split the difference with Kerry, whom they thought could fool the gullible folks in flyover country into seeing him as a more-macho version of Bush, while winking to the base that he was really a tall Howard Dean with some medals. This was a dumb idea, and it hasn’t worked.

Worse yet, if it does somehow get Kerry elected, he’ll be a cripple as soon as he’s sworn in. The anybody-but-Bush crowd won’t have any particular reason to support him once he’s given them what they want, and he doesn’t have much in the way of another constituency. It’s telling that he doesn’t really even have the usual tight-knit “mafia” of longtime supporters the way that Bush, or Clinton, had. He’s got a revolving-door assembly of party apparatchiks and paid consultants. That’s a bad sign.

So, yeah, blame Iowa. I wish we were seeing the election BoiFromTroy envisions, instead of the one we’ve got now.