Clark's Targeted War
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 19, 2003; 8:51 AM
The general is holding his fire.
He's happy to strafe George Bush, but not, for the moment, Howard Dean.
While Kerry, Gephardt and Lieberman are lobbing grenades in Dean's direction every couple of hours, Wes Clark has muzzled himself on that score.
In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Clark unloaded on Bush over 9/11 and Iraq--"a failure of leadership at the highest levels of the administration," and so on. But when a reporter asked about Dean's statement that the capture of Saddam hasn't made America safer, Clark simply said: "I think the United States is safer," and never got around to mentioning Dean.
After Clark, campaigning in New Hampshire, got off the call, his communications director, Matt Bennett, was asked about Dean. "We're not going to get into talking about Howard Dean and his troubles of late," Bennett said.
Translation: Let the other Dems get down in the trenches with Dean, we're staying on the high road and keeping our focus on Bush and the general election.
Clark spokesman Chris Lehane didn't dispute my conclusion, but kept talking about Clark's "real ideas" and "real solutions." He allowed that some of the other Democrats "spend their time beating up on each other." I could not, however, get him to use the words Howard Dean in a sentence, even to say that his guy won't waste time beating up on Howard Dean.
Clark slipped once a couple of weeks ago, saying that while he was getting wounded in Vietnam, Dean (who had flunked his physical with a back problem) was skiing the slopes of Aspen. Lehane claims this was a misunderstood joke. In any event, Clark has since declared a cease-fire when it comes to Dean.
As with many campaigns, though, the Clark operation is tougher in prepared statements. Responding to some Dean comments about moving on from the Clinton era, a Clark statement says: "Did Howard Dean live through the same eight years as the rest of us? Maybe Governor Dean should check his facts. Because if I remember correctly, under Bill Clinton America created more than 22 million new jobs."
A very different Clark in print than I heard on the phone.
Meanwhile, the candidate from Arkansas is playing the military card again in a new ad in which he says he'll straighten up Iraq: "I've led soldiers into battle...I'll get us out of this mess, and I won't get us into another one."
And Clark takes a risky step by aligning himself with one football team, as the Boston Globe reports:
I must have been hallucinating last night. First I saw Karl Rove charming reporters at the White House Christmas party. Then I came home and saw Paula Jones and ex-Monica lawyer Bill Ginsberg on CNN. It turned out Paula Zahn was doing a Clinton impeachment anniversary special.
The media assault on Howard Dean continues, with the New York Times finding some very nervous Democratic types:
"Many leading Democrats say they are uneasy about Howard Dean's candidacy for president and are reluctant to cede him the nomination for fear that his combative style and antiwar stance will leave Democrats vulnerable in November.
"They acknowledge that Dr. Dean has run a strategically savvy campaign that has made him the candidate to beat. But their worry has been heightened anew, they say, by Dr. Dean's statement this week that the capture of Saddam Hussein 'did not make America safer' and by his suggestion that Saudi Arabia warned President Bush about Sept. 11 even though 'I did not believe the theory I was putting out.'
"Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, who has long sought to push the Democratic Party to the center, said Dr. Dean's remark about Mr. Hussein's capture was 'not the smartest thing to say.'...
"Joe Lockhart, who was President Bill Clinton's spokesman in the White House, suggested that Dr. Dean might lack the discipline for a general election campaign. 'It's the unplanned, offhand comments that often seem to play a critical role,' Mr. Lockhart said."
Dean, not surprisingly, is punching back, says the Philadelphia Inquirer:
"Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, seeking to regain momentum that he lost after Saddam Hussein's capture, lashed out at his critics yesterday and defended his assertion that the seizure did not make America safer.
"Dean, who faced a torrent of criticism after seeming to downplay the importance of Hussein's capture, shrugged off polls indicating that he has lost ground with voters. His slip in the polls is the first significant setback for his campaign since he surged to the head of the Democratic pack this year.
"'For four days, the Washington politics-as-usual club has taken every opportunity for attacks on me or on my campaign,' he said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. 'The capture of one very bad man does not mean that this president or the Washington Democrats can declare victory on the war on terrorism.'"
One Dean rival just gave himself a cash infusion:
"Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts became the first presidential hopeful this year to use his own money to finance a run for the White House, loaning his campaign $850,000 and announcing he would mortgage his home in Boston to come up with more funds," says the Los Angeles Times. "The move also makes Kerry the first prominent Democrat to draw on personal funds for a presidential race since enactment of campaign finance restrictions in the mid-1970s that followed the Watergate scandal."
Did you catch the debut of Dick Cheney, media critic? In an interview with commentator Armstrong Williams, the veep initially praised the Fourth Estate before saying: "On occasion it drives me nuts. When I see stories that are fundamentally inaccurate. When I see stories with, it's the hypocrisy that sometimes arises when some of the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they're not, they're obviously not objective. Cheap shot journalism. Now, not everbody's guilty of it, but it happens...
"In recent years there's such an emphasis on getting there fast with a story that oftentimes after goes out the window. People don't check the facts, people will pick up a story, or allegations that aren't true, if they'd check they'd know they aren't true, but they never bother to check. They just reprint them again because they hear somebody else say them."
My suggestion: Cheney should help us get it right by doing more interviews.
The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, who sparked a huge media debate with a cover story on why he hates George Bush, is apparently bipartisan in his disaffections. He's started keeping the "Diary of a Dean-o-phobe."
"It's not entirely clear to me why I've taken such an intense dislike to Howard Dean. Yes, I find him arrogant and frequently dishonest. Yes, I'm certain his nomination would lead to a political disaster of historic, and possibly biblical, proportions. And, yes, I'm continuously dumbfounded that a number of highly intelligent people I know have convinced themselves that his nomination is a good thing, or at least that it's not an unambiguously bad thing. But somehow the whole of my loathing for Dean is greater than the sum of its parts. So I've decided to start a blog on TNR's website to indulge that loathing."
Salon's Joe Conason has a field day with mud-splattered conservatives:
"Right-wing humbuggery always entails the danger that the humbug will someday get caught. That pitfall opened wide on several occasions during the past several days, in events that haven't received their due from the cowering 'liberal' media.
"Recovering addict Rush Limbaugh has never made much noise about the rights of potential criminal defendants (or anyone else, including liberal politicians), until he protested bitterly this week about the seizure of his medical records by Florida prosecutors. Limbaugh complains that investigators are mercilessly violating his personal privacy in pursuit of a political vendetta. When a certain former president indignantly defended his 'privacy' during a criminal investigation, didn't Rush and his loyal dittoheads enjoy a hearty laugh?
"And didn't George W. Bush and his supporters assure us that they would restore 'honor and dignity' to the White House? They had best not invite little brother Neil to any holiday festivities, because his exceptionally messy divorce recently led to a paternity test (along with sharp questions about his business ties to communist Chinese ruling circles.) If these events had occurred in the family of a certain former president, wouldn't they have made front-page news everywhere?
"Finally, there's the ringing vindication of Marilyn W. Thompson and Jack Bass, authors of 'Ol' Strom,' their 'unauthorized' 1999 biography of the South Carolina senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate. Thompson and Bass exposed the unacknowledged fact that he had fathered the daughter of his family's African-American maid, years before his white survivors 'fessed up on Monday. Wasn't a similar accusation falsely trumpeted against a certain former president, while Ol' Strom's revelations were ignored? And why has no one yet asked Trent Lott to comment further on his late colleague's legacy?"
But the right has its own favorite targets, as we see in James Taranto's OpinionJournal column:
"Some of the Democratic presidential candidates have been taunting President Bush over the failure thus far to capture Osama bin Laden--as if that task would be any easier if someone like Wesley Clark were in the White House. But this weekend's capture of Saddam Hussein has one Dem singing a new tune. Madeleine Albright, who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of state, is accusing the Bush administration of having captured bin Laden.
"According to journalist Morton Kondracke, Albright was in the green room at Fox News Channel yesterday when 'She said, "Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?"' Although Albright now says the remark was a 'joke,' Kondracke says that at the time, 'she was not smiling,' and other witnesses back him up: "Two makeup artists who prep the guests before their appearances also reported that Albright did not ask her question in a joking manner," Fox reports."
Those makeup women are the best sources.
Hartford Courant columnist Paul Janesch questions Dean's bedside manner:
"To win the nomination, and certainly the presidency, Dean must appeal to voters beyond his core base, and he won't be able to do that if he alienates those who cover him. Four years ago, John McCain, running for the Republican nomination, was available for an interview by anyone who wanted to talk with him, and he received glowing coverage.
"Candidate Bush was chummy with reporters, even giving them nicknames, and came across in news stories as a regular guy. Candidate Gore, even though he was once a journalist, was aloof with reporters and came across in news stories as pompous. Dean has a reputation for being impatient with reporters, even rude to them.
"Apparently he is not good at schmoozing with the journalists who travel with him. As the primary season begins, a Dean 'narrative,' as journalists call it, will come into focus. He could come across as someone with a hot temper who keeps putting his foot in his mouth. If that happens, Dean might still win the nomination, but it would hurt him badly in a race against Bush."
Radio talker Hugh Hewitt questions the blog-driven nature of the Dean campaign in the Weekly Standard:
"Howard Dean may have jumped the shark with his declaration that 'the capture of Saddam has not made America safer,' but don't tell that to the online world that the Dean campaign has built for itself.
"Over at Blog for America, the official blog of the Dean campaign, Dean's astonishing and obstinately blinkered lift-off into the far fields of political rhetoric passed almost unnoticed as the zealots rallied around the campaign's outrage over the independent expenditure committee ad running in primary states accusing Dean of lacking the foreign policy and national security credentials necessary to challenge President Bush in a dangerous world.
"The campaign reported to its blog readers that 'over four days, 7,732 Americans contributed $552,214.62 to combat a shadowy group of Democrats attacking one of their own with images of Osama bin Laden. You showed that Americans won't be bullied into a climate of fear--and that trying to scare people out of the political process only makes our movement stronger.'
"This is the language of the wild-eyed, and the Dean campaign is increasingly gyrating with the frenzy usually associated with extremism. Which raises the question of whether the vast online network the Dean machine boasts of is such a good thing after all. It may have turned into a self-reinforcing hothouse of out-of-touch, marginal-but-loud cheerleading for itself. Feedback from the middle parts of the American spectrum appear to have been cut-off."
Here's an under-the-radar Dean strategy, in the Des Moines Register:
"Presidential candidate Howard Dean's supporters from other states have written more than 100,000 letters to Iowa Democrats encouraging them to support Dean in the leadoff caucuses.
"The campaign has organized another round of letters to go out this week, campaign manager Joe Trippi said Wednesday. 'One of the things we know is we're the only campaign that's having this sort of massive handwritten letter campaign,' Trippi said."
It took exactly 100 years, but the Virginian-Pilot is correcting a long list of errors in its original Wright Brothers story.
Connecticut Gov. John Rowland is trying to cling to office after admitting he lied about free home improvements, and Mrs. Rowland is taking off the gloves, says the Hartford Courant:
"Although Rowland was apologetic and conciliatory, his wife, Patty, stepped to the podium minutes later to lash out at the press for exposing the ongoing scandals in the Rowland administration. The governor's wife, who recently canceled the annual Christmas party for the press corps for the first time in her husband's nine years as governor, delivered her own version of Clement C. Moore's ''Twas The Night Before Christmas.'
"She criticized Courant reporter Jon Lender by name for his disclosures about the cottage improvements, including a hot tub that was given to the governor as a gift from his longtime assistant, Christine D. Corey, and her husband, Paul. She also scolded television stations and print reporters who have written about the recent arrest of her son, Ryan Largay, on marijuana charges. 'They've whipped themselves into a mad feeding frenzy,' Patty Rowland said. "They've embarrassed our children...'"
Nothing like buttering up the press corps.
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