By Michael Barone

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Tuesday’s tracking numbers are bad news for Dean

Up through Monday, January 12, a week before the Iowa caucuses, the poll numbers from Iowa and New Hampshire since the Christmas holiday had mostly been stable and consistent with each other. The Iowa tracks and polls consistently showed Howard Dean with a lead, though not always one that was statistically significant, and they consistently showed Dick Gephardt second, John Kerry third, and John Edwards fourth, though again sometimes separated by statistically insignificant margins.

In New Hampshire, Howard Dean was well below the amazing 45 to 46 percent results he was getting in December but still led by a statistically significant margin. Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman, who are not competing in Iowa and have had New Hampshire mostly to themselves, were gaining, to the point that Clark was coming in a solid second and Lieberman was in a statistical tie with John Kerry for third.

But the Monday and Tuesday night results were sharply different in the Zogby/MSNBC Iowa and the ARG New Hampshire tracking polls. First, look at Iowa:

According to Zogby, Kerry actually led on Monday night, with 25 percent to 18 percent for Dean. Of course, one night’s sample is not statistically very reliable. Zogby’s three-night rolling track includes only 501 respondents, and the error margin on a one-night sample of 170 voters is on the order of plus or minus 10 percent; that’s why he reports the three-night average, on which the error margin is plus or minus 4.5 percent. But the numbers do support the Des Moines Register’s veteran columnist David Yepsen, who says that many Iowa caucus-goers do not make up their minds until the last minute and give serious consideration to two or more candidates in the last days–and even in the caucuses themselves, where supporters of candidates who fail to meet a 15 percent threshold at the caucus site are invited to support other candidates.

Something similar may be going on in New Hampshire. Here are ARG’s numbers:

This looks like pretty clear movement away from Dean and toward Clark and, perhaps, Kerry. Dean has long had a larger base in New Hampshire than in Iowa, but Clark may be getting within shouting distance. And if Dean finishes second or third in Iowa, his support in New Hampshire could plunge further, and the support for Clark and/or the Iowa winner could rise.

I have some caveats. These results have not been matched in other polls. In other years, especially in 2000 in New Hampshire, there have been sharp differences between polls. There has been less of that this year, so far, but these apparent surges could be the results of one or two nights of aberrant samples. Second, it’s very hard to construct a tight enough screen in Iowa, where only about 100,000 people attend the Democratic caucuses in a state of 3 million people. Many respondents will tell interviewers they’ll participate in the caucus who will never show. Turnout matters very much. Dean supporters–opponents of the Iraq war and Bush haters–seem more highly motivated than Gephardt’s elderly union backers and Kerry’s veteran political activists. But that may be counterbalanced if, as I observed, many of Dean’s workers are out-of-state kids while most of Gephardt’s and Kerry’s are Iowans.

But there is some evidence that Dean is seeing the same numbers in his internal polls. He has put up an antiwar ad in Iowa, which in the 1970s and 1980s was unusually dovish, and he has scampered to make an appearance today (Wednesday) in New Hampshire, to get some time on Channel 9 to counterbalance Clark and Lieberman. Stay tuned.

Trouble looming in Bolivia

George W. Bush had a successful Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico, this week. Mexico’s President Vicente Fox endorsed Bush’s new immigration plan, and Bush invited him to his Texas ranch in March. Bush had an amiable meeting with Canada’s new prime minister, Paul Martin, and reversed policy to allow Canadian firms to qualify for contracts in Iraq. But trouble looms in much of Latin America to the south. And perhaps nowhere more than in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America.

Only six months ago Bolivia had a government that was agreeable to the United States. President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, elected by a narrow margin, seemed committed to free markets and freer trade–"the Washington model," as Latin Americans call it. He favored a Spanish firm’s proposal to build a $6 million natural gas pipeline to connect the gas fields around Santa Cruz, in the country’s eastern lowlands, with a port in Chile, from which it could be shipped as liquefied natural gas. But in October Indian-led protesters opposed to the pipeline laid siege to the capital of La Paz. They claimed that the pipeline would pillage Bolivia’s resources (it would actually bring the government $400 million a year) and that it would be dishonorable to ship it through a part of Chile that Bolivia lost in a 19th-century war.

In the face of this absurd protest Sánchez resigned and moved to Washington. Ascending to the presidency was Vice President Carlos Mesa, who seems bent on propitiating the Indian protesters. But another outcome is possible: the installation of Evo Morales, head of the coca growers’ union, who finished a close second to Sánchez in the last presidential election. According to government sources and a January 8 story in the Wall Street Journal, Morales had contacts with agents of Venezuela’s demagogic President Hugo Chavez, and it is reported that top-level Cuban agents are active in Bolivia. Their goal seems to be to sweep aside the Congreso and Mesa and install Morales.

That would be very bad for the United States. From 1998 to 2001 the Bolivians, under U.S. pressure, eradicated nearly half the country’s cocaine crop. In recent months, Colombia’s courageous President Alvaro Uribe has made great progress in overcoming the FARC guerrillas who are heavily involved in the cocaine trade in that country. All that progress will go for naught if Morales gets in and succeeds in making Bolivia the leading supplier of the cocaine trade. That is something Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro would doubtless like to see. For Castro it would be particularly sweet to see the installation of a friendly government in the country where his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara died.

Since the end of the Cold War many of the chief threats to the United States have come not from powerful states but from failed states, where government holds no sway and criminal gangs with anti-U.S. ideologies have a free run. Bolivia looks like it is well on the way to becoming such a state. The question is what the U.S. government is doing to prevent that from happening.