What the Democratic primary taught us
By Brad Bannon - "The Hill"
And then, there was one.
After last week’s primaries, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has taken command of the race to be the Democratic nominee for president. In the absence of a major controversy or a severe case of buyer’s remorse among Democratic primary voters before Super Tuesday, the former naval officer and Vietnam combat hero will take on the commander-in- chief in November.
Kerry has come as far as he has already because he, more than the other candidates, has the right mix of personality and resume. Marshall McCluhan believed that television is a cool medium and voters who found former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) too hot responded better to Kerry’s reasoned attacks on the president. An examination of the exit poll from last week’s primary in Virginia demonstrates his appeal. In Virginia, a quarter of the primary voters said they wanted a candidate who could beat George W. Bush and three quarters of those voters supported Kerry. And unlike former Gen. Wesley Clark, the “Real Deal” candidate also had the right mix of national security and domestic policy credentials. Only one out of every 10 Virginia voters indicated that they wanted a candidate with the right experience but two thirds of those voters went with the senator from Massachusetts.
We will hear a lot about the Kerry campaign in the next several months. But what can we learn from the post mortems of the campaigns of the Democrats who didn’t survive the marathon?
It’s appropriate in a perverse way that Dean’s campaign collapsed like the Internet Bubble of the late 1990s. Dean’s actions undermined his message that he was not a politician. Dean put himself on the presidential campaign map by running as an outsider but seemed to run out of steam after Mr. Insider, Al Gore, endorsed him. Many analysts wonder whether it was a good idea for the former vice president to endorse Dean but the real question might be whether it was a good idea for the outsider candidate to make such a big deal of the support he received from DC insiders like Gore and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). It also appears that before the bubble burst that Dean was getting ahead of himself and worrying about the general election before Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire voted. Dean looked too much like a pragmatic politician who was trying to position himself for the fall by courting Southern voters and by publicly discussing the importance of his religious beliefs.
It would be foolish, though, to dismiss the Dean campaign as a $50 million train wreck. Dean broke ground for the Democratic Party in a number of areas. First, Dean set the tone for a campaign that could take down the president in November. Dean demonstrated to Democrats that the only way to win was to aggressively take on the president on Iraq and on other issues. Credit also goes to Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) for painting a bright line between Democratic and Republican fiscal policy. Gephardt’s daring proposal to repeal the Bush tax cuts and use the money for health care for working families is an easy-to-understand proposal that demonstrates Democratic allegiance and Bush indifference to the concerns of hardworking families. Dean also deserves accolades for bringing young voters into the process. If Democrats are to be effective in breaking the 50-50 political stalemate that handcuffs American politics, the party will have to keep the Deaniacs in play.
It may be too early to press the “Kerry/Edwards '04” buttons but the senator from North Carolina made a strong case to be on the ticket. John Edwards got a slow start but he worked out the kinks and hit his stride late in the campaign. Edwards started early so he had time to mature as a candidate under the radar before the press descended on the campaign trail en masse. Clark, by contrast, got in the race so late that the press microscope exaggerated gaffes that might have gone unnoticed if the general, like other candidates, had opened in New Haven instead of on Broadway.
In many ways, Edwards made the deepest personal impression on voters. The senior senator from North Carolina did very well with Democratic primary voters who were looking for a president who cared about people like them. Edwards, like Bill Clinton in 1992, became the candidate who gave voice to hard-pressed middle-class Americans. Edwards, however, did not have the national security experience that is necessary in the post-9/11 United States. But Edwards’s “Two Americas” do exist and to win the Democratic presidential candidate must speak to the America that works hard, plays by the rules but is not getting ahead in George W. Bush’s America. |
