Washington — In an anti-Bush voting spree, Democrats are racing through their front-loaded election calendar to crown a presidential nominee -- making John Kerry all but unstoppable in the delegate chase.
But their rush to judgment could backfire in the heat of a general election contest if Kerry escapes the nomination fight untested by a front-runner's usual pitfalls: gaffes, mini-scandals and buyers' remorse.
While a confident Kerry looks ahead to the fall, laying plans for a multimillion-dollar ad campaign against President Bush, his rivals are begging voters to take a second look. They have one week to slow Kerry's momentum, or the race may be over.
"You have the power to keep this debate alive," Howard Dean said Monday in Wisconsin, site of a Feb. 17 primary that every campaign views as a decisive showdown. Dean, the race's dominating force until his sudden fall a month ago, blamed the media and pundits for the premature coronation.
Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark said that "this election is flashing past so fast that for so many Americans they can hardly tell the difference between the candidates." Sen. John Edwards' spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, said voters "need to let this process go awhile to make sure we're ferreting out the best candidate."
But the process wasn't designed to go awhile.
Led by chairman Terry McAuliffe, party leaders eliminated the traditional weekslong gap between New Hampshire's primary and subsequent elections to ensure a nominee emerges by mid-March.
Without that lull, there was nothing to stop Kerry's momentum once he won Iowa and New Hampshire. He piled up eight more victories against two losses -- and was poised to take two Southern states, Virginia and Tennessee, today.
If they stay in the race, Wisconsin may be the last stand for Kerry's rivals because:
- Edwards hopes that Dean will criticize Kerry, giving the North Carolina senator a shot at emerging as an upbeat alternative. But there is no guarantee that Dean will go negative, especially if Edwards remains in the race.
- Dean hopes that Edwards and Clark drop out after Tuesday, leaving him as the only alternative to Kerry. But even Dean knows that the harshest criticisms won't close a 30-point gap, and the latest poll had Kerry beating him 41 percent to 9 percent in Wisconsin.
- Clark hopes he can finish second to Kerry in Tennessee to keep his candidacy afloat, but he nearly bowed out of the race Feb. 3 and will face pressure to do so again.
All three camps privately acknowledge their only hope is for Kerry to stumble. While weaving all sorts of dark scenarios about how that might happen, aides say their money will soon dry up after Feb. 17 if they don't break through in Wisconsin.
Kerry's rise, like Dean's ascent last year, is a product of the hunger to beat Bush. Democrats want a winner; thus they're uniting behind Kerry and his election victories just as they rallied to Dean when he led in off-year polling and fund raising.
Voters in the early Democratic contests said in exit polls that a top quality in a candidate was the ability to beat Bush. They voted overwhelmingly for Kerry.
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