Is John Kerry the man to beat Bush?

Up until about a week before the first primaries were held in Iowa and New Hampshire near the end of January, political commentators and pundits (myself included) were confidently predicting that Dean would romp to victory and would likely have the nomination sewn up within a matter of weeks. Almost no one anticipated the groundswell of support away from Dean and towards Kerry in the final week before the two primaries that catapulted Kerry to commanding victories in both states.

So what happened to Howard Dean? Perhaps the best explanation is that the Democratic primary voters took one long last look at him and simply got cold feet. The knock on Howard Dean has always been that he wasn't electable. I have never bought into the theory that Dean would be unelectable against Bush in November and still believe that he would be a far more formidable candidate than he is given credit for. On the other hand, if enough voters feel that he is unelectable, this turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Regardless of whether they support you or think you are the best candidate, if enough voters think you are unelectable, they won't vote for you -- and then you are unelectable!

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Dean's candidacy is now in free-fall. He has yet to win a primary, polled in single digits in Tuesday's primaries in Tennessee and Virginia, and is currently running fourth in Wisconsin, the primary he has staked his candidacy on winning. It would take a heroic turnaround for Dean to haul himself back into contention at this stage.

Retired four-star general Wesley Clark pulled out of the race Tuesday after disappointing third place showings in Tennessee and Virginia. This leaves North Carolina Senator John Edwards, who finished second in both Tuesday's primaries, as the sole remaining viable rival to Kerry.

But the fact that Kerry was able to beat him by roughly 20 points in two southern states where Edwards (a southerner) was supposed to do well, indicates that the Kerry bandwagon may now be close to unstoppable.

Edwards is an attractive candidate, and is well positioned to pick up the ball if Kerry stumbles or voters start to experience buyer's remorse during the course of the primary season. But there is no doubt that the momentum is with Kerry and that he is in now quite clearly the man to beat.

Kerry's ascendancy is bad news for Bush on a number of counts. The first is that it shows just how committed to defeating Bush in November the Democratic voters are. Typically in primaries, voters use their vote to send a message, voting with their hearts and not with their heads. Fringe candidates typically do well in primaries. This is the time of year people vote for the Jessie Jacksons and the Pat Buchanans of the world. The fact that so early on in the process the Democratic voters have eschewed sending a message and seem to have rallied behind a solid, mainstream candidate shows just how angry with Bush and focused on defeating him they are.

So the question now is whether Kerry is the man to beat Bush in November. I was one of innumerable commentators who more or less wrote off Kerry's candidacy long ago. Up until his stunning turn-around in Iowa that kicked of the race, Kerry seemed to running a tremendously poor campaign. In public he looked stiff and unconvincing. He was failing to get traction with either voters (according to the polls) or donors. His policy proposals were vague and incoherent and he did an extremely poor job explaining his position on the Iraq war. Most worrying of all, he seemed to be running an overly cautious and defensive campaign and looked over-coached by his handlers who were the same team that had managed Al Gore's feckless campaign in 2000.

Perhaps the turning point came when Kerry fired his campaign manager Jim Jordan in November and communications director Chris Lehane in December, and embarked on a bolder and more daring strategy than he had been pursuing. It is unclear to me why anyone would hire Lehane and Jordan (who are well-known in Washington for their disastrous handling of the 2000 presidential campaign) in the first place, and their key roles in the Kerry campaign, were a big reason that I and many others believed that Kerry was on the wrong path, however, there can be no doubt that firing them was the best thing Kerry could have done to resurrect his ailing campaign.

Perhaps their firing and the turnaround in Kerry's campaign strategy and subsequent success are coincidences, but there is no denying that entering the new year Kerry's campaign seemed refocused and rejuvenated.

Kerry's strategy for Iowa and New Hampshire that was the springboard for his resurgence was a political master-stroke. Correctly calculating that a good showing in Iowa would give him momentum going into New Hampshire, Kerry pulled all of his resources out of that state and poured them into Iowa. It worked. He won Iowa handily and rode the momentum to victory in New Hampshire a few days later even though he hadn't campaigned there and had pulled out his entire organisation the previous week.

He hasn't looked back since, romping to victory in 13 of the 15 races contested so far -- most by overwhelming margins. Tuesday's crushing victories in the southern states of Tennessee and Virginia were especially significant as they showed that he could be competitive in southern states which were supposed to favour the southerners in the field, Clark and Edward.

Kerry's swift and stunning reversal of fortune has demonstrated that he has the political deftness that will be needed if he wishes to dislodge Bush in November. I am a firm believer in the primary system. Not that I believe it necessarily produces the candidate best suited for the presidency or the one I admire the most. But the rough and tumble of the primary season ensures that the eventual nominee is the candidate who is best able to withstand the rigours of a tough campaign. If Kerry has the strength and the skill to outmanoeuvre and outsmart Dean and all the other candidates for the nomination -- as it seems he does -- then it means that he is the best candidate to challenge Bush in November.

Kerry has plenty going for him as a candidate. In a recent poll he defeated Bush by a margin of 52 per cent to 46 per cent in a head-to-head match up. He is a decorated Vietnam veteran and long-standing member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both of which should go a long way to reassuring the electorate that he has the foreign policy and national security credentials they are looking for in a president. In the final analysis, it was this background that tipped the scales towards him and away from Dean. Democratic voters were looking for someone who would not be perceived as vulnerable on these grounds and felt that Kerry provided the best combination of experience and toughness.

An interesting side-note is that in the past Kerry has proved himself a deft campaigner, which indicates that his current success is more than just a flash in the pan and suggests that he might be more formidable in November than previously acknowledged.

In 1996, Kerry faced a tight race for re-election against the popular liberal Republican governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld. Weld was everything Kerry wasn't -- charismatic, dynamic, folksy, beloved by the press -- and the general consensus was that he would clean Kerry's clock. But Kerry ran a smart, tough campaign and ended up being reelected by a substantial margin.

It's a story worth recalling as the US heads towards its presidential election in November.

Zafar Sobhan is an Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.