Cattle Call 2004: Comment Period 6/4

It's that time of the week. Rank the current crop of Democratic contenders from top to bottom.

My rankings are based on where I think they would place if the elections were held today, using a mix of poll results, CW, media attention, buzz, and other intangibles.

You guys, however, can rank them however you like.

Last week's rankings: 1) Gephardt, 2) Kerry, 3) Dean, 4) Lieberman, 5) Graham, 6) Edwards, 7) Sharpton, 8) Moseley-Braun, and 9) Kucinich.

And by the way, to those killjoys out there: please spare everyone the "these rankings don't mean shit" rants. We already know. We know it's early. We know more people in the "real" world support Lieberman than around these parts. We know that we aren't representative of the voting population at large (we're much smarter ;)

But, these rankings are fun. And I'll keep doing them every week until November 2004 (about 60 of them, by my quick and dirty count).

And it will be interesting, post-primaries, to see the evolution of the campaigns over the previous year. It might be fun to see people to eat crow. And it'll definitely be fun to see how AKB, at one point or another, will have endorsed every single candidate in the Democratic primaries.

Never before in the history of politics has a campaign been so closely scrutinized by so many people. There are tens of thousands of us now online, parsing the words of each candidate, reading original transcripts, refusing to be satiated by the occassional newspaper or TV campaign feature. By the time the year is out, we'll know just about everything we need to know about the surviving candidates. Our voting decisions will be hyper-informed, based on a level of candidate familiarity once reserved for political writers and campaign insiders.

Think back to, say, 2000. How many of you could name campaign managers or key campaign staffers? Yet now, names like Joe Trippi, Chris Lehane, Garry South and Jim Jordan are becoming household names (at least amongst the tens of thousands who visit this and other weblogs).

The passion we demonstrate for politics is making waves. The Dean people are pioneers in this regard, but by next cycle all campaigns will be "working" the blogs. By becoming engaged in the political process, we will help shape it.

Indeed, do any of you think Dean would be where he is without the power of the weblog? The other candidates, thanks to their techno-ignorance, have ceeded this entire territory to Dean. You better believe no one will make that mistake in future campaigns.

It's a whole new world, and I think it's cool that we are all playing a role. And like it or not, these weekly rankings are part of the process.

[/rant]

Posted June 04, 2003 02:31 AM | Comments (209)