Clintonites were first to take the Dean threat seriously. As reported gleefully in this space (full disclosure: I'm rooting for Dean's candidacy in hopes of the debacle), the Clinton crowd surrounded ex-Gen. Wesley Clark with Clinton managers, spinmeisters, pollsters and fund-raisers and marched him into battle against Dean.

The Clinton political strategy was, as usual, astute: let Dick Gephardt slow Dean down in Iowa, then push Clark hard enough to upset Dean in New Hampshire, or at least attract enough of the isolationist vote from Dean to let John Kerry squeak through.

Of course, if the national economy had gone south, Hillary would have gone South with Clark on her ticket to take on an unemployment-ravaged Bush herself. But with the economy surging and Democrats robbed of their central issue, Hillary can wait till 2008. It is in the Clintons' interest for the 2004 Democratic nominee to lose respectably, not in a landslide, laying the basis for a 2008 comeback that would be impossible if Dean were in the White House.

But what of the other power center of the Democratic establishment — who would be its logical stop-Dean candidate? Not Gephardt, who — although an ardent tax-raiser and entitlement maven — has been a stalwart supporter of winning the war and peace in Iraq. Not Joe Lieberman (too centrist and moralist), not Wes Clark (property of the Clintons), not John Edwards (too light).

So the Kennedy Left moved in to resuscitate John Kerry's campaign. Kerry is a war hero who led Vietnam Vets Against the War and has long been a Kennedy Senate ally. Some liberals believe he expunged his sin of having voted for this year's resolution to overthrow Saddam by recently joining Kennedy in voting against paying for it.

The Kennedyization of the Kerry campaign was carried out by Jeanne Shaheen, the former New Hampshire governor. She prevailed on the candidate to fire his longtime manager, Jim Jordan, and replace him with Mary Beth Cahill, Ted Kennedy's chief of staff. Cahill has impeccable far-left credentials, from Emily's List fund-raising to Representative Barney Frank's staff. She is an ideological soulmate of the superb writer and Kennedy Boston braintruster Robert Shrum, who has been battling Jordan to yank Kerry's moderate position over to the demonstrative dovecote.

Will this Kennedy-Clinton Combine be able to save the Democratic establishment from the assault of this generation's McGovern? Will Terry McAuliffe, imposed on the Democratic National Committee by the Clintons, count any more now that Dean has broken free of the normal financing to rely on Internet movers and billionaire George Soros?

Dean has an unexpected development going for him: because his basic pitch has been to deride Iraq's liberation, he is the one Democrat not ensnared in the now-embarrassing denunciation of Bush economic policy.

Every Democratic candidate, Dean included but not most loudly, has been hammering at the rising deficit and the loss of new jobs, blaming both on Bush tax cuts. But that ground is crumbling under them; if prosperity continues to make its comeback, their biggest complaint would become Bush's greatest boast.

Then Dean would make a bumper sticker out of what we have already begun to hear: "It's the War, Stupid." He would echo the McGovern slogan, "Come home, America," and if the war is going badly in a few months, Dean would blow Clinton and Kennedy and the other old-timers away.

But both Democratic power centers are surely considering the other possibility: that Bush is lucky. What if the war on terror begins to succeed by next summer, casualties decline, Saddam is found or Osama is killed? In that case, Bush would campaign on both growing prosperity and impending victory.

In that case, the Clinton-Kennedy establishment would be better off maintaining control and losing respectably with Kerry, Clark or even Gephardt than getting buried in a landslide with Dean. And in 2008, as Jeb Bush and Condi Rice fight out their G.O.P. primaries, Hillary will be tanned, rested and ready.