John- I think Clark might have been better, but in his few public appearances, he was really quite a weak speaker. Having politics as a new career can be something risky as well, as DeMint learned this year. I'm not sure he would have been able to connect with voters any better than Kerry and he probably would not have been as good a debater, and more prone to gaffes. Overall yes though, he might have been better. It's really impossible to say. But I don't think he had a much better chance at winning. Perhaps none of them did, and Dean was the real choice.
I was still a moderate liberal during the initial Democratic primaries. It rather pissed me off that Iowa pretty much decided who the nominee was for the rest of the nation - if the results hadn't been released New Hampshire and other primaries would have gone much differently.
