Could Howard Dean primary Barack Obama?

That points to what makes these primary contests so interesting: they are more a symptom of failure than a cause. if a President cannot lock down the all the major parts of his own party, and instead must slug it out in a primary, it’s a sign that he’s going to have trouble building a majority coalition in the fall. Taft, Carter, and Bush all lost their general election contests after beating back big time challenges for the nomination. So did Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s stand-in in 1968, after Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy launched insurgent candidacies for the White House.

This is probably why we’re seeing talk about Dean about the moment: many progressives are frustrated with the course of the Obama administration to date. There are hairline fractures in the Obama coalition. It’s improbable that progressives would ever seriously challenge its structural foundations – the progressives also happen to be the most loyal partisan Democrats, and thus would never seriously contribute to a Democratic President’s downfall lest they inadvertently aid the Republicans. But if Obama should find his job approval ratings in Carter or Bush territory come mid-2011, i.e. he’s doomed anyway, a progressive candidate like Dean could conceivably challenge him.