IT'S CALLED NEXIS. USE IT.
by Jonthan Cohn THE NEW REPUBLIC
Candidate: Howard Dean
Category: General Likeability
Grade: F
We've all oooh'd and aaah'd about the Dean campaign's technological innovations. And rightly so. But maybe they should start using the Internet for some more traditional purposes, too--specifically, finding old newspaper articles and websites for Dean's past statements.
This happened to be the week that George Stephanopoulos was traveling with the Dean campaign as part of his ongoing candidate series for ABC's "This Week." Dean learned of the Gephardt attacks while the cameras were rolling, and it was abundantly clear that Dean had no idea whatsoever the attack was coming. It wasn't until he read the press release, which Stephanopoulos handed him, that he understood what Gephardt was even talking about--and even then he didn't seem to recognize his own words.
There's no excuse for this in a professional campaign, particularly one that calls itself the front-runner. Dean likes to say that his 2000 gubernatorial campaign, in which the national conservative movement vilified him for his stance on gay marriage, prepared him for the rigors of a presidential campaign. But it's unlikely he's ever had every utterance in his past parsed and processed this way before. The Dean campaign knows these attacks are coming; heck, the other campaigns have been talking about them for weeks. The fact that they obviously haven't made the necessary preparations--by digging up any damaging material themsleves, and thinking up responses--doesn't suggest they'd hold up well against the onslaught President Bush and Karl Rove might bring.
(Unfortunately, this event doesn't seem to be an aberration. In the same ABC interview, Dean dismissed accusations that he had been a "very strong supporter" of NAFTA. But he used the very same phrase "very strong supporter" in an earlier interview, on the very same program, no less.)
Given that ability to beat Bush is a primary criteria for the Democratic nomination, this is a bad sign. Oh, and it'd be nice if he'd stop being so snippy during intereviews, too.
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