One and one and one is three...

...got to be good-looking to be the nom-i-nee.

The first presidential primaries/caucuses are appearing on the horizon and the once unwieldy group of ten Democratic candidates has been winnowed all the way down to nine. The group divides cleanly into thirds: Kucinich, Sharpton, and Moseley-Braun are sideshow, vanity candidacies, while Gephardt, Kerry, and Lieberman are the party old lions whose sole reason for running seems to be a sense that it is their turn (see: Dole, Robert for the likely outcome of such candidacies). That leaves the final third, the three "idea" candidates: Dean, Clark, and Edwards. I don't label them idea candidates because of any particularly clever or novel policy ideas - there exists remarkably wide policy agreement among all of the candidates - but rather political ideas.

Each candidate has latched onto an important piece of electoral strategy. With Howard Dean, it's the notion of harnessing the internet to match Republican big money with Democratic small money. John Edwards has the brilliant and populist work versus wealth argument. Wesley Clark is laying the groundwork to demolish the notion that patriotism is the exclusive purview of the GOP. All three of these are powerful and essential parts of a national Democratic gameplan.

I suspect that neither Iowa nor New Hampshire is particularly important this time around. The first vital set of contests will happen on February 3rd, when Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina go to the polls. Either Edwards or Clark will likely emerge from the cluster as the Southern candidate to compete with Dean's dominance in the North and West.

My personal preferences run Clark, Edwards, Dean in that order, and anybody who has already written off Edwards' chances are sorely underestimating him. Nonetheless, whichever candidate eventually emerges as the nominee (and I can't see any of the old lion candidates pulling an upset in more than a state or two of the 50) needs to focus on integrating the three ideas into a coherent gameplan. Taken together, they form a potent offensive line behind which a candidate can grind out a punishing, smashmouth running game, which is the only way we'll pull this one out.

On a related note, I've come to the conclusion that, contrary to the common wisdom, the Massachusetts Supreme Court's elevation of gay marriage into a probably major campaign issue actually benefits the Democrats. Not because it's popular with a majority of Americans - I suspect it's rather the opposite - but because most people just don't want to think about such things. In a sense, the gay marriage issue is less of its own issue than it is a stand-in for the larger culture wars, and when the culture war issues get pushed to the forefront (as with Buchanan in '96), swing voters get very uncomfortable. The ugliest and wackiest sector of the Republican alliance gets all energized and noisy and the largely apolitical middle gets a vivid reminder that Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafley, and Bob Jones call the GOP home and have some very specific ideas about how they'd like to decorate it.

Many have speculated that this election will be more about energizing the base than about wooing the ever-slimmer swing vote. I understand the logic, but think it's slightly off. Both bases are fully energized - Bush is just that polarizing. His partisans would walk a plank for him and ours would gladly risk drowning to push him off of one. The two camps are pretty even numerically, and the remainder, while still up for grabs, philosophically leans Democratic, while simultaneously retaining a certain distrust of the Democratic Party proper.

That instinctive distrust is the weak link that is sinking the candidacies of Lieberman, Kerry, and Gephardt. It's no coincidence that the three men who still have a decent shot at the nomination are outsiders - a doctor that governed Vermont as a quasi-libertarian, a maverick retired general, and a lawyer who hasn't yet completed his first stint in office and isn't running for re-election. And one of them will face an incumbent president who only reached the office by dint of belonging to one of America's oldest, richest, and most powerful political families.

The contrast is stark and the landscape is promising, if Democrats can overcome their powerful instincts toward circular firing squads and fashion a coherent message and strategy from the three individual threads. Here's hoping...