Yep. As Broder pointed out. The Democratic Candidates are becoming Cannibals. The Republican operatives are setting back, loving it, and keeping tapes to use later.
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Howard Dean: The Targeted Wing of the Democratic Party
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 5, 2003; 12:00 AM
The hits on Howard Dean are coming fast and furious and from all angles. In the last week, Dean's Democratic opponents have pounded the former Vermont governor with rhetorical assaults.
While Dean publicly wears the target on his back as a sign of his front-runner status, it seems increasingly apparent that there is more to it than that. Dean is the definition of a love-him-or-hate-him guy. He has inspired in the last year far more passion than any Democrat -- running for office or not. But he has also inspired more detractors than any Democrat.
"On a micro level, it's about [Dean's] personality, and the way he rubs a lot of people in the party the wrong way," said an official for one Democratic presidential candidate. "When you suggest that only you represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. When you suggest that members of Congress are cockroaches … that's pretty inflammatory. When you make false claims about your opponents' records and keep having to apologize for it, it kind of adds up …Then on the macro level, I think this is really a struggle for the hearts and souls of the Democratic party and where it's headed. What Dean's done in some sense is a service -- he's making us have a discussion about where we are going."
Last night in Boston, Dean came under a fierce attack during the "America Rocks the Vote" forum. His Democratic rivals accused him of arrogance and demanded that he apologize for saying last week that he wanted to be the candidate for "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."
Dean, saying, "I'm no bigot," declined to apologize for the comment. "I make no apologies for reaching out to poor whites," he said.
In recent days, Dean has come under harsh attack from his left by way of Al Sharpton, who accused Dean of being anti-black, and from Dean's right, by way of Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), who on Sunday disparaged the candidate as a lefty-pinko disaster-in-waiting for the party.
Nearly the entire Democratic field piled on Dean for comments he made in Iowa recently when he told the Des Moines Register that he wants to appeal to "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" as a way to broaden the appeal of the party.
This all raises the question: If Dean becomes the nominee, is there any chance that the party can rally around him to beat President Bush? This is not a subject that any of the people working in the campaigns of Dean's Democratic opponents are eager to broach on the record. But a not-for-attribution sampling from some top officials in other campaigns gives an idea of the anti-Dean angst.
"I think it'll be more difficult than with other candidates" to rally around Dean if he wins the nomination," said an official with one campaign. "I think there would be a lot of hurt feelings by other campaigns, and I think there'll be a lot of concern that this guy will be McGovern II that'll cost you a lot of seats in the Congress."
A Common Enemy
While operatives for Dean's opponents are concerned that he will divide the Democratic Party in the general election, he seems to be uniting his opponents as they look for a way to stop his surprising surge in the early campaign. In a story reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday, "top aides to Edwards, Gephardt and Kerry" spoke about a conference call they held last week during which the aides discussed whether they could block the 1.6-million member Service Employees International Union from endorsing Dean.
Jay Carson, a spokesman for the Dean campaign, said the coordinated opposition to Dean was a sign of desperation. "All this is Washington politicians who are running against Dean, who would rather attack him than explain why after three-quarters of a century combined in Washington don't have a record of results to run on," he said.
Carson said he didn't think Dean would have any problem uniting the Democratic Party if he were to become the nominee.
The Front-Runner Thing
It's not unusual for the leading candidate in any election to draw the most fire, but Dean is hardly a consensus front-runner. In fact, national polls still suggest at least five candidates -- Dean, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), retired Army general Wesley K. Clark and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) have a shot at the nomination. Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) is running well in the key state of South Carolina (although according to one recent poll in the state he's fallen behind Clark) and has the skills, money and infrastructure to be competitive elsewhere.
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll is also instructive. That poll individually pits five candidates -- Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt, Clark and Dean -- in a hypothetical general election match-up with President Bush. Kerry does the best, down only 6 points to Bush, while Dean does the worst, down 15 points.
The Flag Thing
Dean's recent comment about his appeal to Confederate-flag-toting truck drivers illustrates the difficulty he is having from both the right and the left. The flag remark has been part of Dean's campaign speeches since at least February, when he earned thunderous applause for telling the Democratic National Committee's winter meeting that "White folks in the South who drive pick-up trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us, and not them, because their kids don't have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too."
At the time, no one seemed to take the comment negatively. In fact, DeWayne Wickham, a left-leaning, African-American columnist for Gannett News Service, said the comment showed that Dean would confront the race issue "head on." But that was before Dean's campaign took off. Now his opponents won't let him off the hook so easily.
"He speaks as an authority about things he knows nothing about, like voters in the South," said Jennifer Palmieri, spokesman for the Edwards campaign. "What he said [about the Confederate flag] was offensive. It's offensive to stereotype everyone that way."
Erik Smith, a spokesman for Gephardt, insisted that Dean was not being treated differently than anyone else.
"If any other candidate made the generalization that rural white Southern voters who vote Republican also embrace the Confederate flag, they'd be instantly jumped on," he said. "I think it's one thing to say that people should be supporting us for whatever reasons and quite another to say that your position on guns allows you to actively seek their support. He was making an argument about his electability, saying he can win people who embrace the Confederate flag. What Gephardt said in his statement is, 'I don't want their support.'"
Meanwhile, Miller, the folksy conservative senator from Georgia who has already endorsed Bush, attacked Dean from the right on NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday.
"Howard Dean knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about Sunday," he said. "This must be his Southern strategy. And I can tell you right now, that that's the same kind of stereotype, that's the same kind of character trait that I write about in this book. I write about in this book in 1988 Michael Dukakis coming to Georgia and having this rally, and they had all these bales of hay stashed around here and there, like it was some kind of set from the television show 'Hee Haw.' That's not what the South is."
If Dean wins the nomination, it will be interesting to see the party try to rally around him. Should he win it, the party may have to live with the fact that Democrats have already done much of Bush's heavy lifting for him. In other words, there may be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at work: The attacks on Dean for being too far left or too far right to beat Bush may turn Democratic voters off to Dean and make unelectable someone who might otherwise be a viable candidate.
"Politics overcomes a lot of stuff," said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University. "The Democrats can't afford the kind of bitterness that went on between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy in the 1980 election. That really hurt the party. That was ideological and personal. That was Kennedy saying Carter wasn't a real Democrat."
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