Thirteen points is a lot of points, and I don’t see the physician from New England carrying South Carolina. So, to use the words the good doctor himself undoubtedly often used during that famous emergency-room stint of his in which he freaked out at the sight of a blood-drenched patient: D.O.A.! What do you say, Committee to Save Howard Dean co-chairperson? But what do we do with our stock of “Your Rant Makes Me Pant” posters?
My vote for most prescient (if inadvertent) New Hampshire predictor goes to the WaPo’s David Segal, who yesterday, even before the voters clambered through the snow to the polls, published a survey of the pop-music tastes of the numerous Dem candidates. You could tell, for example, that Wesley Clark was bound to bomb (12 points total) by his choice of favorite album: The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” Bleh. Everyone knows that the dopey, draggy, irritatingly coy “We All Live In a Yellow Submarine” was the Fab Four’s very worst tune. It’s taps-time for Gen. Clark, even if he is an alleged big pal of Hillary and her buddy Mary Steenburgen, the faded actress who’s recently reemerged into the limelight to remind everyone just how faded a prospect is Clark himself. There’s one yellow submarine that’s headed straight for Davey Jones’s locker.
John Kerry also selected a Beatles album as his favorite, but it was the fine and memorable “Abbey Road.” No wonder Kerry led the Dem pack way ahead with 39 percent of the vote. Kerry’s by no means my cup of tea, but at least he’s got one thing going for him, as Segal put it: “Kerry rocks!” The Massachusetts senator played guitar in high school and even had his own band for a while.
Now that’s Dean’s so over, however, my new favorite Dem candidate, in musical taste and otherwise, is Al Sharpton. His favorite musician, he told Segal, is James Brown (whom he once managed). Yeah! Oh, so what if Sharpton got an astounding 0% of the vote in New Hampshire? Sharpton’s a man with chutzpah. He tried to send a young assistant district attorney to prison in the Tawana Brawley hoax in 1987, and when that didn’t work–hey, he ran for president! You gotta hand it to the guy. If that’s not je ne sais quoi, I don’t know what is.