• After a Clark event, I watched as Clark pressed the flesh around the room. There were several young women who obviously had stars in their eyes for Clark, they were clearly smitten by him in what looked like a puppy-love kind of way. They radiated their smiles at 100,000 watts and kept their eyes firmly attached to the candidate. As he approached, they tensed for the contact... and then lost a little of their luster, as Clark quicky shook a hand or just breezed by without real contact.
  
  I don't know if this was deliberate or not, of if Clark was under marching orders to under no circumstances be seen or photographed being in any way physical with a young female (with visions of file footage of Monica Lewinsky dancing in his handler's heads), but it happened two or three times as I watched. Maybe it's a wife thing.




• Josh Marshall commented several times in the last few days that when you attend an Edwards event, you fall under his magic spell and are convinced in the moment that this guy is fated to be President, but that this passes once the whole thing is done, and it's then hard to see what the attraction was all about. After watching Edwards do that speech, I understand what he means.
  
  Edwards is very good at appearing natural, he's very much at ease with what he's doing, he connects with the crowd, he's clearly a natural politician in the Bill Clinton mold, and the populist content of the speech is good as well, red meat for egalitarian Democrats and liberals, with much talk of change and elitism and invocation of our natural enemies (lobbyists, for instance), but...
  
  The "but" is that if you look at only a snippet of the speech, say in a soundbite on a news program, you become very aware of all the hard technique that underlies that performance, and this is very disconcerting, much as it is when all of a sudden while watching a play that's sucked you into its world you realize how hard an actor is working, and the whole experience collapses. (This can happen in literature as well, when a novelist's tricks start to draw too much attention to themselves -- although, obviously, this isn't as much a problem in the world of postmodernism, where drawing attention to the frame is part of the point.)
  
  This could be a serious problem for Edwards, because very few people are going to put in the kind of time necesary to watch large portions of a stump speech either live or on TV, and most people are going to experience him through snippets and soundbites.




• Conversely, the rawness and roughness of political inexperience that Wesley Clark's exhibits is charming, in its way, but it sets up a different kind of vibe. In the recent NH debate, I found myself feeling anxious every time he spoke that he was going to say something wrong, or look stiff, or otherwise trip himself up due to what is essentially a complete lack of political experience of the type that makes career politicians so disturbingly smooth and (generally) difficult to ruffle (see Edwards, above).
  
  When Clark's name was first touted as a possible candidate, I fretted about his lack of executive experience, and more or less acquiesced to the argument that, as American military proconsul in Europe, he had to have many of those skills to some unknown degree, but that's not exactly the same thing as the kind of abilities that campaigning requires, and it's clear from watching him that he's a tyro at it -- an intelligent, quick to learn, affable and driven tyro, but a tyro nonetheless.
  
  While I go back and forth about whether Clark is the candidate that can best take down Bush, or on whether he's the one that the Rover Boys are most afraid of (this week, the conventional wisdom -- or was it a trial balloon sent up via David Broder? -- is that the WH is ascared of Edwards), I do think that, given the tightness of the calendar, his retail political skills are not going to improve fast enough, and that they will hurt him badly at some point (as they already have with the way he handled the Peter Jennings-Tim Russert Michael Moore-Bush-is-a-deserter attack).
  
  All the more reason why Clark should be someone's running mate, and not at the top of the ticket, but if Kerry's the man, he's unlikely to go looking in Clark's direction. (More likely is Edwards, who'd brings geographical balance to the ticket.) So at this point, the only real hope for Clark to be V.P. is if Dean wins -- I haven't changed my opinion that Dean/Clark is a natural fit.

Update: Lieberman looks like he knows he's out of it. I've just seen two different campaign stops, and both times he swung out his arm, fist extended, in a feeble motion while saying, with obviously strained enthusiasm "We're going to the White House" (or some such totally cliche campaign blather). Even given Lieberman's generally Eeyorish demeanor, it was clear that he didn't believe for a moment what he was saying, and I think more than ever that his showing in NH will force him out of the race, which is all to the good.