When I think about it, I am completely bewildered as to how Kerry became the front-runner. The man is a nothing. In 20 years in the Senate, he somehow managed to do nothing. This aura of "electability" is completely baseless. Were Dean to be the nominee, he might be defeated by Bush. If it's Kerry, though, he's going to get destroyed.
You can attack an opponent on two levels, personality and the record. Dean is "the angry guy." Kerry is "presidential," whatever that means. Kerry has no record. Dean's got a decent record. Attacking someone on their record is far more difficult than attacking their personality, and while Dean might not have responded as well during the pre-primary period as he could have, he certainly demonstrated he could take it. And that it already happened is an advantage, because by the time the Bush machine got rolling, it would have been old hat. There's just no way they could have made that an issue for 5 or 6 months.
Dean's liabilities are clear and apparent: he's "the angry guy" and he voted for civil unions. So the playbook would have had two items: make him look hot-headed, and bait homophobes. W managed to overcome being portrayed as stupid, though, and I think Americans would choose hot-headed over stupid any day of the week. So that wouldn't work well. Baiting homophobes would be highly effective for a minority, and moderately effective to a point with the rest. That one's easy to have backfire. So that wouldn't be a perfect strategy either. That's not to say that Dean would automatically win, but that Bush would have a real challenge taking him on.
Not so for Kerry, though. His personality might be inoffensive, but his record stinks. And with 20 years of stinking, there's more than enough to keep the machine fueled up for the election cycle. He missed 70% of the roll calls. He introduced something like 11 (I've seen multiple numbers between 7 and 13) pieces of legislation, half of which were ceremonial. He voted against Desert Storm, against funding for intelligence services in the 90s, and for Iraq War II. He's in support of some of the weakest dinosaurs of the Democratic platform. The only apparent advantage he has is having been in Vietnam, and it's pretty clear just by looking at history that military service doesn't make nearly as much of a difference as people make it seem. In short, he'll get destroyed.
A very cynical weblog post/article about the Dean implosion. To summarize: the media turned against Dean and for Kerry because Dean was a threat. He showed that a candidate didn't need television in the Internet Age. Kerry magically snowballed based on "electability," which means "what I think other people think." How do you know what other people think? Well, the media tells you. I don't know how much I agree with this thesis, but it's enough that I don't dismiss it outright.
mute has something he would like to add.