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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JakeStraw who wrote (2752)	6/27/2003 2:47:07 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 10965

No Democrat Tops 50 Percent in Online Primary Dean Garners 44 Percent of MoveOn.org Votes By Will Lester The Associated Press Friday, June 27, 2003; 1:09 PM URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40761-2003Jun27.html None of the Democratic presidential candidates received 50 percent of the vote in the first online primary, denying a key MoveOn.org endorsement to any of the White House hopefuls. In announcing the final totals Friday, MoveOn.org said Howard Dean topped the list of contenders with 44 percent of the vote, or 139,360 votes. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio finished second with 24 percent, or 76,000 votes, and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts got 16 percent, or 49,973 votes. The rest of the nine-candidate field finished in single digits. Absent the endorsement, Democratic candidates were counting on gaining thousands of potential volunteers, donors and campaign dollars from the online presidential primary. By the time voting ended at 1:15 a.m. EDT Thursday, 317,639 people had voted in MoveOn.org's first presidential primary, 54,730 had pledged to volunteer for their preferred candidate and 77,192 authorized MoveOn to pass on their e-mail address to their favorite candidate. Participants are not asked whether they are registered to vote, but they are asked if they are over 18. "The primary benefit for candidates is to broaden their base of support, put new supporters on their rolls," said Wes Boyd, co-founder of MoveOn.org. Boyd said Friday that his organization would wait until the fall before asking its members whether they want to hold another primary. Campaign officials agreed that the event offered an opportunity to cultivate online support. "We saw it as a chance to increase the number of people interested in the senator's campaign, a way to increase the number of donors in the campaign and a way to bolster our long-term online communications capabilities," said Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Kerry. A spokesman for candidate Joe Lieberman said the Connecticut senator's campaign sent an e-mail to supporters asking them to participate, as several other campaigns did. The threshold to win the primary and get MoveOn's endorsement was 50 percent. Those who voted were offered the option to donate to their preferred candidate. MoveOn raised $3.2 million for congressional candidates in 2000 and $4.1 million for candidates in 2002, Boyd said. © 2003 The Associated Press

To: JakeStraw who wrote (2752)	6/27/2003 4:33:06 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

The Man To Beat Howard Dean, despite a bad showing on ‘Meet the Press,’ is still bringing in the bucks msnbc.com NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE June 27 — The phone rings in the background. It’s one of the Democratic candidates calling for money. The lobbyist lets the call go into voice mail. “I can’t tell you how many phone calls I’m getting,” he says. “I feel like that beautiful girl in college who has everybody calling her.” IT’S NEARING THE end of the second quarter filing period, and Democrats will measure who’s up and who’s not by how much money they raised in the last three months. The buzz is that Howard Dean will post over $4 million. Two rival camps privately predict that Dean will come close to $6 million. There is panic in the air. Democrats on Capitol Hill see Dean and his anti-war populist campaign as “McGovern Redux.” They worry he’ll lead the party into a repeat of Democrat George McGovern’s 49-state loss to Richard Nixon in 1972. It’s not that the war in Iraq was that popular with Democrats. If the congressional resolution empowering President Bush to invade Iraq had been a secret vote, many more Democrats would have voted no. But lawmakers fear the unknown, and they don’t know Dean the way they know the other contenders in the race. Plus he’s running a campaign against them, and the way they have accommodated a popular president. Democrats have won the White House only twice in the last thirty years. Both times it was by somebody who was not part of Washington. Governors don’t speak Washingtonese. Whatever you think about Dean and his cranky assault on the Establishment, you can’t avoid the fact that he fits the pattern. Thanks to a little strategic thinking and a lot of luck, the former Vermont governor is positioned as the only outsider in the race at a time when Democrats have given up on insider politicians. Dean says that when he travels around the country, he finds that Democratic voters are almost as angry at Democrats in Washington as they are at Bush. Dean appeals to the idealism in the party. His theme — “Let’s take back the country” —echoes Jimmy Carter’s campaign call a quarter-century ago for a government as good as its people. Like Carter, Dean is not someone you would immediately peg as charismatic. But his edgy personality is reminiscent of John McCain, and his blunt talk gives him a Trumanesque appeal of the little guy who fights back. When Dean first spoke out against the war in Iraq, he did so in a political climate of 70 percent support for the war. Analysts saw it as political suicide. “How many electoral votes are there in Iraq?” Dean was asked at one political gathering. “None,” he fired back. “They’re in Iowa.” The centrist wing of the Democratic Party is fighting hard to head off Dean. In the upcoming issue of the “New Democrat” magazine, an editorial headlined “Why we fight” lays out the case against a Dean candidacy. Without having read the piece, which is embargoed, I presume it rests on Dean’s opposition to the war as exposing the party’s longstanding weakness on national security. Not long ago, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Vatican of the New Democrat movement, pointed to Dean, a fiscal conservative, as an example of a successful governor in the DLC model. The DLC’s change of heart appears principally based on differences over the war with Iraq. After siding with Bush, the DLC and the pro-war Democrats have a lot at stake in defending that position regardless of the deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq and the growing concerns about whether Bush misled the country in the run-up to the war. What Dean’s critics find especially galling is how he is weathering his poor showing on “Meet the Press,” the premiere Sunday talk show. Host Tim Russert quizzed him on U.S. troop strength around the world, caught him in Gore-style exaggeration on an anecdote about a teenage girl seeking an abortion, and questioned whether he had the “temperament” to be president. Dean appeared uncertain even when his facts were OK, and he seemed annoyed at being grilled. By all accounts, it was a terrible performance. “If he was Gephardt, he’d be out of the race,” says a Democratic strategist. But the next day Dean presided over a hokey official announcement of his candidacy, which drew a large press contingent and got him on all the news shows. “The rules don’t apply to him,” says the strategist. “He operates in a different universe. His supporters say, ‘That mean Tim Russert,’ and they send him another $200 on the Internet.” The terrible logic of the Democratic nomination is that anybody who runs left enough to get the activists can’t win a general election. Dean has the centrist credentials to maneuver his way back to the center, where he’s probably more comfortable anyway. His health care plan is relatively modest, and he supported the carrying of concealed weapons in Vermont. But Democratic officeholders have a fear of the unknown, and when they look at Dean, they see an angry liberal who will send them into the wilderness for another 25 years. Savior or spoiler, Dean has gone from a second tier candidate to the man to beat. © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.