If Clark wins – I’ll quit!

New Hampshire It’s the poll that’s got ’em all hot: Wesley K. Clark: 49 per cent; George W. Bush: 46 per cent. CNN and USA Today conducted it, and on air this week, listening to her ‘senior political analyst’ declare that ‘President Bush is sinking’, Judy Woodruff looked as if she wanted to do her Meg Ryan When Harry Met Sally impression: ‘Yes, yes! Oh, God!! Yes!!! Aaaooooowwwwaaaooah!!!!’ I’d say it’s the poll that’s faking it. It’s comprised of 1,003 ‘national adults’, of whom 877 are registered voters. Whether the others have ever voted at all is unknown. But, as a general rule, polls of registered voters are less accurate than polls of ‘likely voters’, and polls of just any old adults are less accurate than polls of registered voters. And, by ‘less accurate’, I mean they tend to overstate Democrat support. And, given that 48 per cent of the sample identified themselves as Democrats, what this poll seems to have found is that Clark attracts the 48 per cent you’d expect him to plus a barely detectable smidgeonette of the rest. You’d almost have thought they did it that way to get that particular result, wouldn’t you? Well, all credit to them, they did. And we should allow Judy and co. their moment of triumph: they’ve finally got some ‘hard’ ‘evidence’ that Bush is a one-termer. For a year now, the Democratic nomination has been a battle between joke candidates, led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, and dull senators, led by John Kerry of Massachusetts. Vermont’s Howard Dean briefly caught the media’s fancy – he’s anti-war and from the only state with legal gay sorta-marriage. But, after a while, they began to notice that the more they talked up Dean the more the folks in the White House seemed to be falling around splitting their sides.