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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (24245)	1/14/2004 8:18:46 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793759

Among the raft of new economic rights that Kerry promises to mint is a right to be told the location of the telemarketer who interrupts your dinner. Dukakis Plus 4.4 Percent? Dean can't win? Perhaps. But after a dreadful campaign, the Democrats' 1988 nominee still won 45.6 percent of the vote By George F. Will Newsweek Jan. 19 issue - Each morning, as Republicans—bright-eyed after sleep made especially refreshing by dreams of defeating Howard Dean—shave or apply makeup, they should look into their mirrors and say to the images of complacency there: "Read my lips—Michael Dukakis got 45.6 percent of the vote." advertisement The landslides that buried George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984 are incessantly invoked as the Great Warnings to Democrats determined to go on an ideological toot with Dean. But contemplation of another Democratic disaster, the 1988 Dukakis campaign, actually should temper Republicans' Dean-induced triumphalism. Dukakis's campaign lurched from his advice to Iowa farmers (grow endive) to his stance toward the Pledge of Allegiance (he opposed mandating that Massachusetts's school days begin with it) to his weekend-release program for convicts (it enabled a murderer to commit a rape) to his affectless answers to questions about whether he would favor capital punishment for a person who raped and murdered his wife (gracious, no, we must not "glorify vengeance") to his bobble-head appearance riding in the tank. His campaign is rightly remembered as the locus classicus of political incompetence. Yet in spite of all his misadventures, Dukakis, a chilly vessel of New England's starchy, hectoring liberalism, running in a conservative decade and in an unpromising year against Republican peace (the Soviet Union was crumbling) and prosperity (the unemployment rate was 5.5, the economy's growth rate was a robust 4.1), convinced 41,809,074 Americans. Sixteen years later—and four years after an essentially tied election—there is a polarizing president who may have made the undecided "swing" voter an endangered species. How confident can Republicans really be that Dean or any other Democrat cannot conceivably get 4.4 percent more of the popular vote than Dukakis got? Now, just as Detroit has been described as "Cleveland without the glitter," Dean may be Dukakis without the charm. So much so that last week Dean decided to adopt tactical reticence in order to slow the flow of the entertaining ad libs (e.g., let us not prejudge Osama bin Laden) that surely will be heard again in autumn reruns, in Bush re-election ads. Doubts about whether the middle class will vote for a substantial tax increase have caused Dean to rethink the satisfying clarity of his tax policy, which until now has been primarily a pledge to repeal "every dime" of the Bush tax cuts. Doubts about Dean are causing some Democrats to plight their troth to Wesley (I Never Was a Republican) Clark, who until five months ago had not plighted his troth to the Democratic Party. Perhaps as repentance for his tardiness in converting to the one true political church, Clark is running as FDR, circa 1936, by advocating a 5 percent surtax on millionaires—those miscreants FDR called "economic royalists." John Kerry is worried that "nearly half of all foods advertised during children's programming are for cakes and candies." He is also addressing the crisis of the phony twang. He is cross that some telemarketing calls now come from abroad: "When people pick up the phone they hear people who've been trained to speak in an American twang and dialect, so you won't know where they are." Makes your blood boil, doesn't it? Among the raft of new economic rights that Kerry promises to mint is a right to be told the location of the telemarketer who interrupts your dinner. It's about time. Dick Gephardt is one of the Washington "cockroaches" that Dean talked about before Dean, incensed by rivals' criticizing him, decided it was the duty of Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe to make everyone play nicely together. Gephardt may have run the most consequential campaign. He has done more than anyone to make apostasy into orthodoxy: most of the Democratic candidates, professing concern for American jobs, have repudiated the free-trade principles shared by both parties through three generations. Under those principles, America is exporting mostly low-skilled jobs (e.g., telemarketers, even those skilled in acquired twangs) and importing two to three times more skilled jobs (e.g., the 65,000 U.S. employees of Siemens). So, come to think about it, perhaps Republican complacency is understandable. Certainly Pat Robertson's is. The televangelist says God has told him that "it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004." (If the Lord said "like," the Lord talks like a teenage girl.) "It doesn't make any difference what" Bush does, Robertson says, because God is "blessing" him. Backward reels the mind, to 1988. The night Dukakis finished third in Iowa's Democratic caucuses (behind Dick Gephardt and Illinois Sen. Paul Simon—perhaps Dukakis's endive idea needed tweaking), Robertson finished second to Bob Dole in the Republican caucuses. He handily beat Vice President George Bush, who 10 months later became the slayer of Dukakis. Which gives you some idea of just how important next Monday's Iowa caucuses might be.