The Revisionism is Killing Me [View All]

[On the Road]

I've started to hear the line in the media and even here on DU that Dean was never really the front runner, he never really had all that support, the polls lied -- basically that it was all an illusion.

I'm sorry -- there are a range of opinions on who's responsible, but up until a couple of weeks before Iowa, Dean was clearly the front-runner, and if primaries had been held anywhere across the nation, he would have won handily and been the nominee, for better or worse.

How do I know? Despite what you're hearing, the polls were pretty well borne out by the results. Dean won in DC as predicted. In Iowa, he was running at 20% in the polls and came in with 18%. In NH, the polls showed somewhere from 5-18% back and he finished 13% behind. He has come in much lower in more recent contests, but none of them shold have been a shocker to anyone following the polls.

I think the media is trying to exonerate itself by pretending that the whole thing never happened. This infuriates me much more than the claim than Dean did it to himself.