Friday, January 02, 2004
Can He Play the Big Rooms? Ryan Lizza has an even-handed piece [subscription required] about Dean and the Deaniacs up on the New Republic website.
Lizza emerges from a DC-area Dean house party encouraged to learn that the people excited about the former governor aren't all rabid fanatics.
But he's also careful to observe that the Dean camp had a lot easier time moving from asterisk-territory to 450,000 supporters than it's had moving from 450,000 to the 1,000,000 backers that campaign guru Joe Trippi predicted Dean would have lined up by the new year. (On the website the tally currently stands at 554,902.)
It's still very much an open question, in other words, whether the Dean phenomenon has legs.
