DO REPUBLICANS WANT DEAN? OR DO THEY JUST WANT THE LONG-TIME FRONTRUNNER THEY KNOW AND LOATHE?

Hesiod notices that some Republicans (O'Splotchy, for instance) are jumping to Dean's defense now that Iowa is a dead-heat.

The media is running with a "Dean is beleaguered" theme for the moment, and is going after him. Nevermind that Dean has never had a large lead in Iowa to begin with.

Anyway, Hesiod correctly reminds us,

Again, just because the Republicans want to run against Dean...doesn't mean that he can't beat Bush, OK?

Exactly. Here's the thing: At this point it's not that Republicans want Dean as the nominee right now because they think he's the most beatable. They want Dean because he's been viewed as the unstoppable sure-fire nominee for a few months now. During that time, the Republicans in DC and the so-called liberal media have had plenty of opportunities to test, re-calibrate and fine-tune their attacks on Dean, specifically for him. ("pessimistic!" "angry!" "unelectable!" "gaffe-prone!") If, say, John Edwards or Wesley Clark suddenly became the frontrunner, and then the nominee, the Republicans would basically have to start from scratch. It's not that they don't have things with which they think they can attack those candidates. It's that those things take some measure of time to go from RNC fax machines to media-accepted Conventional Wisdom. They'd have to start all over. And besides, suddenly stopping the demonization of Howard Dean in order to demonize Wesley Clark would look, well, pretty transparent to some voters, so it would have to take time.

And oh by the way, so nobody gets too excited, Dean leads in more states than all the other candidates combined times two.

UPDATE: With Kerry taking the lead in Iowa, you just knew he'd have to get Drudged.