Is Dean Doomed?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 12, 2003; 8:27 AM
Pick up the papers and there's no shortage of people predicting that Howard Dean, if he wins the nomination, will be road kill by the time the Bush campaign gets through with him.
He will be, in a word, McGovernized. Smart primary candidate, but no chance of winning. Too liberal, too northern, too angry, too antiwar, too blunt, too short, too whatever.
But what if that's wrong?
What if the same media geniuses and political insiders who dismissed the ex-governor as an asterisk a year ago, who put their money on the Washington insiders, are off base again?
What if Dean is actually the strongest Democrat when it comes to taking on Bush?
I don't know what will happen next summer and fall if Dean in fact wins the nomination. There are too many variables (the economy, Iraq) and Dean is too untested on the national stage. Knocking off an incumbent president, especially in a wartime atmosphere, is a difficult thing to do.
But I do know that the man from Vermont -- even though it has a population less than a third of Brooklyn's -- is pretty nimble. He captured the mood of disaffected Democrats better than any of his big-shot rivals. He didn't invent the Internet, but he exploited it as an organizing tool in a way no one had ever done before. His supporters are passionate. There have even been a couple of obituaries where families ask, in lieu of gifts or flowers, that donations be made to the Dean campaign.
I also know that Dean is hard to pigeonhole. Favors gay civil unions but would leave gun control to the states. Pushing a big health care program but balanced 11 budgets in Montpelier. Opposed the Iraq war but backed the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan conflicts and doesn't want to cut and run from Baghdad.
It's not gone unnoticed that he has a tendency to shoot off his mouth, which is both a strength (people like blunt talk) and a weakness (he's floated an unusual 9/11 theory).
Dean might prove to be a weak general-election candidate, if he gets that far, but the pack journalism about him was wrong once before. Maybe it is again.
Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol (who backed McCain over Bush last time) offered a contrarian take on this the other day:
"Could Dean really win? Unfortunately, yes. The Democratic presidential candidate has, alas, won the popular presidential vote three times in a row--twice, admittedly, under the guidance of the skilled Bill Clinton, but most recently with the hapless Al Gore at the helm. And demographic trends (particularly the growth in Hispanic voters) tend to favor the Democrats going into 2004...
"Dean has run a terrific primary campaign, the most impressive since Carter in 1976. It's true that, unlike Carter (and Clinton), Dean is a Northeastern liberal. But he's no Dukakis. Does anyone expect Dean to be a patsy for a Bush assault, as the Massachusetts governor was?
"And how liberal is Dean anyway? He governed as a centrist in Vermont, and will certainly pivot to the center the moment he has the nomination. And one underestimates, at this point when we are all caught up in the primary season, how much of an opportunity the party's nominee has to define or redefine himself once he gets the nomination.
"Thus, on domestic policy, Dean will characterize Bush as the deficit-expanding, Social Security-threatening, Constitution-amending (on marriage) radical, while positioning himself as a hard-headed, budget-balancing, federalism-respecting compassionate moderate. And on foreign and defense policy, look for Dean to say that he was and remains anti-Iraq war (as, he will point out, were lots of traditional centrist foreign policy types). But Dean will emphasize that he has never ruled out the use of force (including unilaterally). Indeed, he will say, he believes in military strength so strongly that he thinks we should increase the size of the Army by a division or two. It's Bush, Dean will point out, who's trying to deal with the new, post-September 11 world with a pre-September 11 military."
The Note has more on John Kerry's profane description of bush's Iraq policy:
"En route to a Claremont, N.H. chili feed, Kerry defended his use of the 'F' bomb in a recent Rolling Stone article.
"'I might have used the word bungled. I might have used the word lied. I might have used the word misled. I might have used the word screwed up or any number of things,' the senator said. 'But then I went to the thesaurus and looked it up. And I think I pretty well described exactly what they did in Iraq, frankly.'"
He looked it up in a thesaurus??
No obscenity yesterday, but Kerry is doing his blankety-blank best to attack the front-runner, as the Boston Globe reports:
"Howard Dean would be 'eviscerated' by President Bush's re-election team next year if Dean emerges as the Democratic Party's nominee for the White House, chiefly because of the former Vermont governor's 'enormous deficit' of experience in national security and military affairs, Senator John F. Kerry said yesterday.
"These comments are the strongest Kerry has made in conveying that Dean would lose to Bush, an argument that has become a tacit theme of Kerry's own candidacy as he struggles to surmount Dean's double-digit lead in New Hampshire polls before the primary there Jan. 27."
Joe Lieberman has been getting more press for getting stiffed by Gore than he would have gotten if the ex-veep had embraced him. But American Prospect's Michael Tomasky thinks it's a bit much:
"Can someone please enlighten me: Why the pity party for Joe Lieberman?
"The Connecticut senator has been parading around for the last few days, since Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean, with the mien of a virtuous spurned lover, trying to position himself much as Princess Di did after her positively beastly treatment by Prince Charles. Diana pulled it off successfully because she did, in fact, deserve some pity. Lieberman does not.
"This is not high tea. This is politics. It's a tough game, and, as they say in sports, you have to make your own breaks and earn it on the field. So the question: What has Lieberman done to earn Gore's endorsement?
"The answer is, 'not much.' He hasn't performed. I know at this point exactly what Lieberman partisans would say: that if one looks at the national polls, he's running pretty well (usually third behind Dean and Wesley Clark, sometimes second, occasionally fourth), and he's very much in this thing.
"But everyone knows those poll standings are all about name recognition (and, of course, he has such wide name recognition because of . . . Al Gore, who made him an international celebrity by putting him on his 2000 ticket). To anyone watching the race closely, it does not feel as if Lieberman's got anything going for him besides name recognition -- no real oomph behind those numbers, no particular momentum. And if one looks at statewide polls in the important early primary and caucus states -- that is to say, states where voters having been laying eyes on the candidates -- Lieberman isn't much of a factor. His best early state is South Carolina, where he typically runs third or fourth. Not much to brag about."
A day after reports that the prez is considering slamming Dean soon after the State of the Union, the Washington Times says no way:
"President Bush will try to remain above the political fray for longer than usual leading up to next year's election because of what his handlers see as a significant 'stature gap' between Mr. Bush and his challengers.
"'If he gets down ... with the Lilliputians, he is going to look like another one of them,' said a White House source close to the president. While it is traditional for an incumbent president to cling to the political high road for as long as possible, the imperative is even greater for Mr. Bush, whose war on terrorism has made him a larger-than-life figure to both supporters and detractors."
That means surrogates will be doing the heavy lifting.
The legal triumph of McCain-Feingold has produced a new search for ways to circumvent it, says the Philadelphia Inquirer:
"At the end of their sweeping, 131-page opinion upholding restrictions on big-money political donations, Supreme Court justices conceded something every politician always knew: 'Money, like water, will always find an outlet.'
"It already has.
"Despite the legal challenge, the new campaign-finance law upheld Wednesday has been in effect since November 2002. The result has been financially weaker political parties, a growing set of ideological and special-interest groups jockeying for power, and a wild eruption of innovative fund-raising and influence-seeking techniques.
"Nowhere is the new landscape more evident than in the presidential race. Three candidates, led by President Bush, have decided to forgo public campaign financing and spending limits through the primary-election season...
"Both Republican-leaning and Democrat-leaning groups have emerged to promote candidates and educate voters, replacing the parties as the organizers of politics and the reservoirs of unlimited contributions."
General Clark is not wearing well on television, at least according to the New Republic's Michael Crowley:
"I badly want to see in Wesley Clark a conquering Democratic hero. But I just can't shake the notion that the guy's a bit of an oddball--a smarter Ross Perot with medals. This feeling was affirmed for me watching Clark on MSNBC's "Hardball" Monday night. Overall I suppose Clark did fine. But he foolishly let himself get bogged down in a long exchange with host Chris Matthews over whether he'd been relieved of his post as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in 1999. The result was a long and tedious parsing of the details of one of the few lowlights in Clark's career--and an exchange that, to me, made Clark look stubborn and overly proud...
"More than once, the live studio audience laughed heartily at this absurd who's-on-first routine, usually at the general's expense. And no wonder: Clark was playing a far-too-cute semantic game. It's also worth noting that this arcane exchange constitutes some 1200 words in a transcript of 6600 words--or nearly one-fifth of Clark's appearance. Someone needs to teach the general how to change the subject."
The Koppel Debate continues to draw less than rave reviews, with this assessment by Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix:
"Ted Koppel's opening gambit at Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate was so inane and disrespectful that at first I didn't realize the proceedings were officially under way. When Koppel asked the candidates to raise their hands if they thought Howard Dean could beat George W. Bush, I assumed he was just warming up the crowd.
"It was only after Koppel warned John Kerry that his time had expired that I noticed it was actually a few minutes after 7 p.m. To my disgust, I then knew that Koppel's little exercise in horse-race stupidity was being staged not just for the benefit of a few C-SPAN geeks (me included) and the University of New Hampshire crowd. It was also part of the actual televised debate, as broadcast live on New Hampshire's WMUR-TV (Channel 9), and rebroadcast later that night on ABC's Nightline.
"What a disgrace. Before the debate, Koppel told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that his goal was to 'keep people at home from dozing off.' He accomplished that, but only by tarnishing his own considerable reputation. By focusing on Al Gore's surprise endorsement of Dean, and on the polling and fundraising shortcomings of the other eight candidates, Koppel actually pulled off the heretofore unimaginable feat of giving Dennis Kucinich a moment in the spotlight."
Slate's William Saletan turns thumbs down on the "Ted Offensive":
"This was Ted Koppel's worst performance as a moderator. You can forgive him for experimenting with a couple of questions about the horse race. But when the experiment failed and he persisted, that's on him. When he asked inside-baseball questions and got substantive answers instead, he chided the candidates for failing to stoop to his level. First he asked John Kerry why Howard Dean couldn't beat President Bush. Kerry talked instead about why he would make the best president. Koppel then turned to Dick Gephardt and said, 'I'm not really asking you -- at least, I wasn't then -- whether you think you're the better candidate. I was simply asking you whether you thought that Howard Dean could beat George W. Bush.' Later, Koppel asked Carol Moseley Braun whether Al Gore's endorsement of Dean would make blacks loyal to Dean. Braun talked instead about what Democrats should stand for. Koppel then said, 'Sen. Edwards, what I was trying to get to with Ambassador Braun was whether loyalty can, in any way, be transferred by an endorsement.' Edwards wisely ignored the question as well...
"Kucinich and Kerry chastised Koppel for his obsession with polls, but he wouldn't let up. He derided the poorer candidates and asked John Edwards why he was falling short of "expectations." These were the last 90 debating minutes of the year -- a crucial opportunity for every candidate other than Dean -- and Koppel wasted 30 of those minutes on questions barely worthy of aides in bars."
That new Pentagon policy of limiting Iraq contracts to companies in the US of A and its war allies has touched off an international storm, but Bush isn't backing off.
"President Bush on Thursday strongly defended his decision to bar countries that opposed the Iraq war from competing for more than $18 billion in U.S. prime reconstruction contracts, even as political pressure built for him to reverse the move," says the Los Angeles Times.
"In his first comments on a policy that has reignited trans-Atlantic tensions, Bush said 'the expenditure of U.S. dollars will reflect the fact that U.S. troops and others risk their life. ... It's very simple. Our people risk their lives. ... Friendly coalition folk risk their lives. Our contracting is going to reflect that. That's what the U.S. taxpayers expect.' "Bush scoffed at the idea that the Pentagon policy to restrict the bidding to the United States, Iraq and 61 countries that have backed the mission could violate international agreements. 'International law? I better call my lawyer. I don't know what you're talking about, about international law,' the president said."
Bill Kristol is off the reservation again, arguing in a memo that "this particular effort to reward friends and punish enemies is stupid, and should be reversed."
Finally, there are times when The Washington Post is not the most popular reading in the West Wing. That was also true more than 30 years ago, as we see in this Post account of the latest Nixon tapes.
Richard Milhous Nixon had concluded, in those Watergate days, that "the real problem is the press. 'Sue the bastards!' he says, pounding his desk audibly. 'Forget the Democrats, sue the media! Sue The Post.'
"He and Haldeman conjure a scenario where [campaign aide Donald] Segretti sues The Washington Post for libel. 'He couldn't win it, of course, and he could drop the suit right after the election, but it would create doubt in the public mind.' Haldeman suggests they could serve Post executives with a subpoena during the public dedication of the Post's new building downtown, scheduled for that week. They enjoy the idea but don't appear to take it very seriously.
"'The goddamn press can do anything it wants,' Nixon says bitterly. 'It's the damn Eastern Establishment. They can't help what's happening' with the prospect of his reelection...
"Nixon and Haldeman sound indignant at The Post's articles, which Nixon describes as 'hearsay, guilt by association, character assassination and smear . . . the most scurrilous personal attacks on a president in history.'"
And, as it turned out, accurate. |
