Before we go sifting through the New Hampshire results, let's pause for a second to commemorate the absurd and purposeful bit of voodoo that is the modern primary system. In the past week and a half, John Kerry has gone from also-ran to frontrunner on the strength of wins in two states that are neither consequential to the larger election nor representative of the country as a whole. Both are remarkably white, rural, and culturally conservative--by which I mean, warier than most of change in all its guises. And after those two states come a series of primary days dominated by southern states that are considerably more conservative on the whole. There is real institutional genius in the design of the primary season; it helps mightily in culling out insurgents and left-libs, as it was intended to do.

On the other hand, I don't mean to say that "the system" got Howard Dean in any simple sense--it certainly stacked the deck against him (and that goes for the media as well as the Democratic party apparatus), but Dean also played into its hands. Last night's post-New Hampshire speeches offered a fair glimpse of how Kerry has managed to advance and Dean to decline. Kerry, speaking first, delivered a well-wrought address touching every theme that Dean popularized; Dean, in contrast, was received like a rock star by his supporters and spent the first 10 minutes or so shouting--sorry, invoking--slogans in parallel construction. The tone was more subdued than his post-Iowa rally, but he was no less the off-key, uninspiring cheerleader. Finally, after he had made most of his audience tune out, Dean turned to a more reasonable facsimile of the stump speech that made him popular in the first place. But barring a miracle, it was--and is--too late.

This is a huge win for Kerry, as much for the way the rest of the field broke as for his own point total. To put it another way, Kerry didn't just win; everybody else lost. No one is going to buy a resurgent Dean at this point. When all the spin's been spun, he still blew a 20-plus point lead in the state where his campaign first caught fire. John Edwards made relatively paltry gains on the basis of his strong Iowa showing, winding up a nose behind Wesley Clark, who skipped Iowa to engineer a strong showing in New Hampshire. (As of this morning, with 98 percent of precincts and over 200,000 ballots counted, Clark led Edwards by fewer than 700 votes.) [CNN results page.]

Consequently, there is no number two in the race at the moment. (And Kerry's fundraising is starting to reflect that: reportedly he raked in a million on the net this past week.) Edwards and Clark will tussle head-on for that designation starting next Tuesday, but if Kerry takes next week's big prize, Missouri--and with Gephardt's endorsement, it shouldn't be very close--and performs respectably elsewhere, the two Southerners may be running for vice-president at this point. That race is presumably Edwards's to lose, since Clark's military credentials would be redundant on a ticket headed by Kerry.

I'll be writing more about the question of Kerry's "electability" later, but meantime here's a sampling of BW reader responses to my query on the subject yesterday. (I'm interested in hearing more, also from Kerry enthusiasts.)

In closing, I wonder if you've noticed the increased frequency with which media are referring to Kerry as John F. Kerry, no doubt nudged on by Kerry's people. Privately, Kerry has always felt that his middle initial would be an ace in the hole someday. Here is Brian Willson, a very bitter former Kerry supporter and fellow Vietnam vet, on an encounter he had with JFK v2 shortly after Kerry's 1984 election to the Senate:

In the wee hours of the morning, you made two comments that troubled me: (1) you stressed [that] your initials, JFK... would help you one day in your quest for the White House, and (2) that after War Department briefings (and perhaps CIA as well) about the need for funding and training contra terrorists in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, you had a new appreciation for their importance in furthering U.S. policies. [Read Willson's essay.]

So here's today's question: What does the F stand for, anyway? Use your imagination; Kerry admirers welcome to play as well.