THE DEAN BUBBLE

Posted on: Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 by Laura Ingraham

The Dean Machine, with its fluorescent orange ski caps and cyber-whizzes all hooked up coast-to coast was supposed to be an unstoppable force. Like so many others who should have known better, I bought into the Dean hype. Big time. Sound familiar? Can you say internet bubble? Through much of the late ?0s, millions of Americans tossed their money into gems like Buy.com, flowers.com, and com.com without really knowing how these companies were ever going to turn a profit. We didn't bother to look at the business models. We didn't care. It was all so exciting”it was a movement. We were told that the old rules?of the marketplace didn't apply. Profit-to-earnings ratios of 50 to 1 were not uncommon, 20-something internet execs were becoming gazillionaires, and the stock prices just kept skyrocketing. But then reality set in. It turns out that the old rules did matter. The slick dot-com television ads couldn't conceal the fact that there was no there there. The bubble burst. In retrospect, it all seems so obvious. How could so many people have been fooled for so long? And so it goes with Howard Dean. In the months leading up to Iowa, many thought Dean was leading more than a campaign. He was leading a revolution”a revolution against doing things the old way.?See Howie use the internet!?See Howie mobilize the youth vote!?Hey, the fact that his wife isn't on the stump with him is cool!? Yet cool turned to cold and even to Democrat stalwarts, Dean's shoot from the hip?style didn't wear well. (Do we want to trust our future to the Deaniacs?) In retrospect, the Dean frenzy should have been seen for what it was”a frenzy. Suddenly, someone like John Kerry seems like the safe, brick and mortars?candidate for Democrats. Maybe he's not as exciting as Dean, but so what? He's a known quantity. And with so much at stake, bricks and mortars look pretty good. Counting Dean out”even with his hysterical braying on Monday night”would be a mistake. Many of the same internet companies that we were dumping a few years ago have made comebacks. But Dean doesn't have years, or months. He has a few weeks at most. He will have to learn, like so many high-tech companies have done, that there is no magic bullets that guarantee success. Just as high-tech companies have had to concentrate on actually making a profit, the Dean campaign must concentrate on translating the enthusiasm from its hardcore activists into real votes by lots of real Americans. E-BLAST EXTRA! Could it be that the surge by Sen. John Edwards is really the best political news that conservatives have gotten in a long time? Wait, you say, Edwards could pose a tough challenge to President Bush in November! Edwards has some of that Clinton appeal on the stump, without the Clinton other-women baggage. This may be true, but conservatives need President Bush to need them. And the Bush campaign will not be able to take the conservative vote for granted if it faces a tough challenge from another deft campaigner from the South. Edwards, who manages to seem more moderate than he is and whose attractive young family seems genuinely together, could be a lot more difficult to defeat than yet another Massachusetts liberal like John F. Kerry. If so, the Bush Administration will have to rally the base like it has never been rallied before.

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Articles by Laura Ingraham

Title	Published
Order in the Court!	02-26-04
Have They No Decency?	02-16-04
Laura's Weekly E-Blast	02-05-04
THE DEAN BUBBLE	01-21-04
THE ATTACK OF THE OPEN BORDER ELITES	10-28-03
Back To School, or Back to...Sex?	09-03-03
The Elites Anti-Religion Obsession	08-26-03
WHAT WOULD REAGAN DO?	08-20-03
Laura’s Weekly E-Blast	06-30-03
The Democrats’ Michael Moore Problem	03-24-03
BLAME AMERICA REDUX
Gray Skies Just Got Darker
He's Not Invincible

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