HOWIE'S LATEST PHANTOM
DNC research staff were scrambling Sunday morning to try to at least identify by state the woman that party chairman Howard Dean made mention of during his lackluster appearance on Meet the Press. In discussing his party and its support of abortion rights, Dean said:
Let me tell you why I think we ought to -- why I want to strike the words "abortion" and "choice." When I campaigned for this job, I talked to lots of Democrats. And there are significant numbers of pro-life Democrats in the South. And one lady said to me, you know, "I'm pro-life. I don't like abortion. I would never have one. I would hope my daughter would never have one. But, you know, if the lady next door got herself in a fix, I'm not sure I should be the one to tell her what to do." Now, we call that woman pro-choice, but she thinks of herself as pro-life. The minute we start with the "pro-choice, pro- choice, pro-choice," she says, "Well, that's not me."
The DNC search was instigated out of concern that some media might turn to them to confirm the story.
"We've had media come back to us before on some stuff that he [Dean] has put out there, and this was a situation where we thought maybe somebody might be looking into it," says a DNC researcher. "We're looking over the itineraries, trying to see where it might have taken place, but he wasn't in office at the time, so we're kind of hamstrung."
Generally, DNC researchers said they were pleased with Dean's performance, if only because they felt host Tim Russert was not on his game.
"It definitely wasn't your typical 'gotcha' interview by Russert," says the DNC staffer. "On just about every issue: Social Security, the filibuster, DeLay, Bolton and Iraq, Dean basically just put out what we gave him: Bush is privatizing Social Security, DeLay should be in jail, the filibuster is un-Democratic, Bush is a liar, Bolton is a liar. Russert never called us on a single thing. We got lucky."
During the interview, Dean stated the usual Democratic canards: that Republicans wanted to privatize all of Social Security, that House leader Tom DeLay's admonishments at the hands of the House Ethics Committee were comparable to criminal prosecutions, and that the filibusters were the end of democracy as we know it.
Dean's stories of interactions with folk have raised questions before. During the campaign, some questioned whether several incidents where Dean assisted supporters who suddenly fell ill at a campaign event were staged. And Dean at one time seemed to pull back from a story he told early in the campaign season involving one of his young patients and the possibility of her having an abortion after being impregnated by her father.
"It isn't that he goes in thinking he's going to lie about this stuff, whether its Social Security or abortion," says the staffer. "He's like a lot of these top-flight politicians, who take their talking points and build on them."
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