sisyphusshrugged

Howard Dean would be "eviscerated" by President Bush's re-election team next year if Dean emerges as the Democratic Party's nominee for the White House, chiefly because of the former Vermont governor's "enormous deficit" of experience in national security and military affairs, Senator John F. Kerry said yesterday. These comments are the strongest Kerry has made in conveying that Dean would lose to Bush, an argument that has become a tacit theme of Kerry's own candidacy as he struggles to surmount Dean's double-digit lead in New Hampshire polls before the primary there Jan. 27...

If I were Senator Kerry, I suspect I would probably try to avoid the subjects of gutlessness and deficits, but that's just me.

Please, people, do try to remember that Pyrrhus actually lost.

Pyrrhus inherited the throne of Epirus in Northern Greece around 306 B.C.E., and as a young man proved himself on the battlefield again and again. Pyrrhus apparently had great strategic skills, but he also had the reputation of not knowing when to stop. In 281 he went to Italy and defeated the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum, but suffered bitterly heavy losses. The devastation led to his famous statement, "One more such victory and I am lost" -- hence the term "Pyrrhic victory" for any victory so costly as to be ruinous.

I really don't think this is our best model for the primaries.