• Joe Lieberman. The odds-on favorite going into the race, a proven campaigner, and the only one of the candidates who supported the war with Iraq from the get-go. However, in his public appearances he comes across like someone who'd been long buried and then dug up again, and who faces an uphill battle in convincing democrats that he can raise the party, like the phoenix, from the ashes.
• Howard Dean. The phenom of the race, who ignited a wildfire in the democratic establishment by his ability to raise funds far in excess of his opponents, and who describes himself as "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." (That's a line he borrowed from the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.) And if he wins the nomination, it could, as Lieberman said, "consign the party to to the political wilderness for a long time to come." In TV interviews, he looks as wholesome, stiff and unshakable as a bowl of tapioca- a pudding I recall spitting out as a kid.
• John Kerry. A genuine war hero and the first choice of the Democratic Leaders' Council (DLC), whose been pushed off center stage by Dean's surge in popularity, thereby jeopardizing the Senator's chances in his must-win state of New Hampshire, which could herald his downfall. To me, he resembles Lincoln, sans a beard, and his voice isn't squeaky like "Old Abe's."
• Bob Graham. With Dean swiping his main issue, his opposition to the war, he's been relegated to the second row; and his idiotic suggestion that the president should be subject to impeachment for misleading Americans on the justification for the war put him in the bleachers. And in the debates, he looks like a man secretly gnawed at by a scarcely endurable pain.
• Dick Gephardt. If Dean cancels out Kerry, he could become the party's favorite by default. But if he loses in his backyard state of Iowa, he might as well resign himself to remaining the minority leader in the House. I've always thought of him as being a bundle of contradictions that clash like cymbals.
• John Edwards. He could emerge as the dark horse, if Dean gives Kerry a whipping up North. In which event, he could paint himself as the moderate savior of the party in the South. As a self-proclaimed populist, who looks like he's in the mid-to-late thirties, he could possibly prevent Bush from sweeping all of Dixieland. Two moderate southern governors-Carter and Clinton- did.
• Among the other three wannabe nominees- Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Carrol Moseley Braun and the Rev. Al Sharpton- the Reverend is the one whose received the most enthusiastic response from audiences for his "tell like it is" way of speaking. But he still acts like a New York cab driver with an opinion about everything, which would turn-off most people, as would his flattened-down version of Don King's hair.

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