The morning after

The best post mortems I’ve seen this morning on the New Hampshire primary come from Real Clear Politics and Hugh Hewitt. At RCP, John McIntyre considers “where we go from here.” He concludes that “Kerry’s in control and he can go for the knockout punch next week, but Dean’s not going away, and Kerry may have a bigger problem in the South and the West than we think. Let’s see how well Kerry weathers the inevitable media scrutiny fast approaching his campaign.” Meawhile, Tom Bevan looks back at the performance of the pollsters. The highest marks for New Hampshire go to CNN/USAT/Gallup.
Hugh agrees that Dean isn’t going away, and this makes him glad. Not because he fears a Kerry candidacy. In fact, his “partisan instincts [say] that Kerry, [whose] glass jaw is so obvious it sparkles, looks like the best nominee from a Bush point of view.” Hugh wants Dean around because Dean and his followers are still the best story in the campaign and because “the Democrats need a knife-fight to drive the ghost of Clintonism [including Terry McAuliffe] out of the management team.”