MattS from Clark Sphere "can't see anyone other than Dean winning"

[dkf]

http://theclarksphere.com/archives/000359.html#000359

The Disappearing Clark versus the winner Dean

It would be pretty hard to conceive of a campaign that has gone worse than Clark's. Somehow, he retroactively voted for the war, then unvoted for it, told the grassroots they were unimportant then held them up as the key to his candidacy, released his military records revealing that he in fact has superpowers and the ability to see the future to absolutely zero fanfare, revealed himself as unable to rebut smears that are silly with any grace (the praise of Bush for doing a good job in winning the war in Afghanistan being the prime factoid), and got laryngitis. Clark is over seems to be the operative meme on the Kos, with the 40-6 NH poll being the main factoid. Clark is small is basically the factoid here, as the press and blogs basically decided that Clark is smart, has good ideas, and there are several other Senators with those qualities and ground organizations in place that feed the media with better catering. Like with Kerry, Steve Soto, Kerry's biggest blog booster, never said 'I don't support this guy anymore'. He just doesn't talk about Kerry much. Funny. Matthew Yglesias, Brad Delong, Kevin Drum, even Andrew Northrup don't really talk about Clark except in a sort of 'wait-and-see-he's-not-doing-very-well' mode.

I've worked really hard for the Clark movement, and I'm sad to see this meme triumph. But it has. So far, it's the Clark campaign that's considered awful, not Clark himself. His reputation is now at stake, as evidenced by the lack of 'Dean-Clark' ticket advocates in the leftie blogosphere. That was a big meme back in the day.

snip

And so, the Daily Meme can't see anyone other than Dean winning, for he is ahead in the polls, the messaging game, and smacks the memes out of the park. Indeed, Dean's the movement is the message is precisely the delivery part of the message, because it's a transformative idea that people can see and taste. You can call beautiful language 'just rhetoric' if you're cynical enough (and people are), but you can't fake a die-hard group of grandmothers and annoying college students, because it's really really hard to fake social context.

--Wow, pretty strong stuff from another Clark Sphere guy.