With the conventional wisdom telling us that John Kerry’s got the nomination all but wrapped up, most bloggers are feeling free not to pay too much attention to today’s contests in Virginia and Tennessee.
There are two interesting anti-Kerry tidbits though. Glenn Reynolds links to a story in The Tehran Times (which wins him points right off the bat) that reveals a strange email supposedly sent by Kerry’s office to an Iranian news agency, promising to repair the damage done to U.S.-Iran relations if he’s elected president. If this is real, here’s a memo to the Kerry campaign: Last we checked, Iranians don’t get to vote here.
And a poster on The Daily Kos reports that Kerry supporters “stole” the endorsement of Washington DC’s Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, by using an obscure by-law to reconvene the meeting after everyone had left, and voting to endorse their man. The Gertrude Stein Democratic Club? Now the nomination is really in the bag.
Noam Scheiber, writing on his weirdly-named New Republic blog, &c, comments on how the Meet the Press interview highlighted the president’s problems with “the vision thing”.
In a moment of flashback, Mickey Kaus writing on Slate remembers that there’s still, technically, a nomination fight going on, and acidly points out what a lot of our readers have been arguing: Wes Clark is getting an increasingly raw deal.
And Michael Graham, writing on The National Review‘s blog, The Corner, notes “the general lack of passion, across the board” as Virginia’s big day arrives … which feeds the assumption that John Kerry is a lock and the national primary process is already over.”
Obviously Graham hasn’t been privy to the sturm und drang tearing apart the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club.
–Zachary Roth
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.