Goring Dean
Add one more name to the list of those who believe that Howard Dean will prove a cataclysmic disaster for the Democratic party: Al Gore. Why else would Gore have endorsed him?
Think about it. Does Gore still wish to be president? Pretty clearly, he does: Otherwise he would have found himself a real job and moved to LA, rather than dabbling in business while maintaining a theoretical domicile in Carthage, Tennessee.
But how to gain the presidency? Gore was right to decide against running in 2004. The problem for him was not just that incumbents are hard to beat, but that his party has gone nuts. Had Gore run, much of the rage now directed at George W. Bush for defeating the Dems in 2000 and 2002 would have directed itself instead at Al Gore for losing an eminently winnable race. Gore would have had to reply endlessly to questions about his campaigning in 2000, about his handling of the Florida recount, about his ultimate concession, about his silence on the Bush tax cut, etc. etc. etc. By 2008, those passions will have drained away.
Of course, should another Democrat win in 2004, there will be no contest in 2008 for Gore to join. So Gore has to wish for defeat this year.
And not for mere defeat, but for catastrophic defeat. A Democratic wipeout in 2004 would make Gore’s performance in 2000 – 51 million votes, 266 electoral votes – look retrospectively much more impressive.
That will be especially true when the Democrats wake up to the fact that Dean runs badly with working-class whites and African-Americans. (James Taranto yesterday cited this wonderful line from the Chicago Tribune: “The pre-printed signs ‘African-Americans for Dean’ were held by white supporters.” Meanwhile, Ryan Lizza is astutely observing in this week’s New Republic that Dean and Kerry are campaigning in Iowa’s richest towns, while Gephardt and Edwards seek their votes in the poorest ones.
Those who argue that Dean will be a more formidable candidate than expected point to his Vermont record as a fiscal moderate and to the comparative modesty of his health-insurance plan, which is way less generous than that offered by the other major Democratic candidates. But Dean’s combination of weakness in foreign policy, ultra-permissiveness in social policy, and stinginess in fiscal policy isn’t “centrism”: It’s the politics of the dinner parties of Brentwood and East Hampton, of people who read Vanity Fair and don't need an SUV because their grocer delivers. Look at this election from the point of view of a swing voter: say the assistant manager of an Ace hardware in suburban Nashville. He’s patriotic in foreign affairs, moderate to conservative on social issues – but worried about how he’s going to pay his mother’s nursing home bills. What is Dean offering him? Nothing but contempt. I’ll bet a box of Canadian doughnuts that if Dean is the Democratic nominee, Bush will win Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania – all states that Gore carried in 2000.
I would not be entirely surprised to see Bush take California too.
It’s already easy to predict the Democratic party’s after-action reports on 2004: “We got pushed way too far to the extremes, especially on national security issues, by a candidate who lacked national experience and was foisted on us by a bunch of white college kids who didn’t know anything and didn’t care anything about the economic problems of our voting base.”
Sometime after November 2004, a candidate who hails from the border South, served in Vietnam, appeals to black voters, accumulated a long record on national security issues, held the country’s second-highest office, was associated with the longest economic expansion in the country’s history, and proved himself a popular vote-getter in three national elections will begin to look good to his fellow-Democrats, never mind the Florida recount.
So Gore needs to speed his party toward the cataclysm – and if he can win new friends on the party’s left and look like a good sport while greasing the skids, all the better.
It’s very striking that the party’s two frontrunners for 2008, Gore and Hillary Clinton, are both borrowing pages from the old Richard Nixon playbook. Hillary is reinventing herself just as the “new Nixon” did in 1968; Gore meanwhile is following exactly the same plan for 2004 that Nixon adopted in 1964, when he made sympathetic noises toward Goldwater while complacently watching his successor lead his party to the worst debacle in its post-Depression history.
2004 may not be quite as one-sided an election as 1964 or even 1972, unless of course Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein is captured or shown to have been killed before November. But even without a spectacular further victory in the war on terror, 2004 is shaping up to look a lot like 1988, when another Northeastern near-pacifist won only ten states, all of them except West Virginia in the band of Yankee settlement across the top of the country.
So: well played Al. We’ll see you again.
Jefferson v. Hamilton
If you are interested in the politics of the American Founding, do read Allen C. Guelzo's brilliant article in the Claremont Review of Books about the 18th century Federalists - who they really were, what they really believed, and how their memory has been defamed.
Guelzo is one of the consistently original and inspiring of American historians. His Redeemer President is far and away the best intellectual biography of Abraham Lincoln. His forthcoming book on the emancipation proclamation, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, which I have just read in galleys is an equally brilliant elucidation and defense of a document that Richard Hofstader once dismissed as having all the poetry of a bill of lading. As Guelzo poetically replies, a bill of lading was one of the most important documents of nineteenth-century life: it was the bond by which the captain of a vessel undertook to deliver his cargo safe and sound - and with the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln discharged his duty to deliver America's former slaves to a safe harbor of liberty.
And Speaking of Books
I thank all the NRO readers who wrote in to help me with my storage problems by buying surplus copies of my books. I have now eliminated my excess stockpiles of How We Got Here and the American edition of What's Right. I still have a large oversupply of Dead Right both hard and soft cover and the (larger) Canadian edition of What's Right in both hard and soft cover.
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