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Politics : THE VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (5457)	1/18/2004 12:45:21 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 6358

Roger Simon HOWARD AND HILLARY!? newsandopinion.com \| DES MOINES Just a few months ago, the conventional wisdom about the Democratic presidential campaign, was, well, conventional. It was called the Good Neighbors Theory: Dick Gephardt of Missouri would win neighboring Iowa. John Kerry of Massachusetts would win neighboring New Hampshire. And John Edwards of North Carolina would win neighboring South Carolina. The fear was that the party would be fractured and the campaign would be a long and grueling one. Howard Dean? Oh, yeah, angry guy, shouts a lot, anti-war. Forget it. Few would have guessed that today the hottest political story would be who is running second to Dean in the national polls and whether Dean can hang onto his lead in Iowa. And nobody could have guessed that someday Dean would be mulling how he will choose a running mate. "Geography matters," he said recently. "Electoral votes matter. And if they are running now, how they were able to attract votes." So go through the list: Geography would eliminate fellow-New Englanders Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. Would Dick Gephardt of Missouri balance the ticket? Well, maybe. But his selection might depend on Dean's third condition: How many votes Gephardt attracts in the primaries. And Dean is working hard to eliminate Gephardt in Iowa. Also, the bad blood between Gephardt and Dean seems real. In July, Dean told me: "I worked for Dick Gephardt (in 1988.) I love Dick Gephardt. He's one of the most decent people I know. And he's one of the best." But that was before Gephardt began attacking Dean both on issues and on character. When I asked Dean recently if he wanted to change his mind about Gephardt, Dean replied, "Yeah." Then in a tone more sorrowful than angry, Dean said, "I'm surprised at the bitterness of the attacks, I really am. I don't think they're going to succeed, but I'm surprised at it." (Gephardt says Dean started it all.) So whom does that leave? Sen. Bob Graham of Florida would give Dean balanced geography and electoral votes. Wesley Clark (who says he doesn't want the job) would satisfy Dean's geography requirement and Clark may very well show impressive vote-getting ability in the primaries. (Clark believes they will be so impressive that he will beat Dean and become the nominee himself.) Ditto Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who has recently been receiving numerous favorable articles in the press. But there are others, not running for president, whom Dean could turn to if he manages to win, including a choice that would be nothing less than explosive: Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. There is one problem with this, however. In speech after speech, at stop after stop, Dean berates those "Washington politicians" who voted for the war in Iraq. He says they either lacked judgment or courage or both. And Sen. Clinton voted for the Iraq war. So I asked Dean if a vote for the war would disqualify a person from becoming his running mate. "No," Dean replied instantly. "Absolutely not." But will Dean ever get to the point where he actually gets a chance to pick a running mate? He does see a way to beat President Bush. "Karl Rove (President Bush's political guru) discovered it, too, but I discovered it independently," Dean told me recently and added that the theory is embodied in the writings of George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. "What you do is crank the heck out of your base, get them really excited and crank up the base turn-out and you'll win the middle-of -the-roaders." The theory is that swing voters share the characteristics of both parties, and eventually go with whatever party excites them the most. "Democrats appeal to them on their softer side - - the safety net - - but the Republicans appeal to them on the harder side - - the discipline, the responsibility and so forth," Dean said. "So the question is which side appears to be energetic, deeply believing in its message, deeply committed to bringing a vision of hope to America. That side is the side that gets the swing voters and wins." This theory dictated a free-wheeling, slash-and-burn campaign style in order to "crank the heck" out of the Democratic base, while also incorporating the thoughts of Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, who urged Dean to take "this campaign to a higher ground." Which is why Dean's stump speech today is a combination of the two. "I concluded that the only way we can win," Dean said, "is to really get our base excited: African-Americans, Latinos, trade-unionists, women, and now young people." In other words, those Democrats who believed in heading for the center - - by voting to support the war in Iraq, for instance - - were missing the point entirely. If you excited the base, the center would follow. If you headed for the center, you would never get the center because you would appear wishy-washy and weak. Excite the base, that is still the key to the entire Dean campaign.

To: calgal who wrote (5457)	1/18/2004 12:45:30 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6358

Jack Kelly O'Neill has ruined a reputation newsandopinion.com \| Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill took a swing at President Bush... and punched himself in the nose. "The Price of Loyalty," written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind on the basis of interviews with and documents supplied by O'Neill, made two sensational charges: First, that Bush was detached and disengaged in Cabinet meetings, "a blind man in a room of deaf people." Second, Bush had planned to invade Iraq right from the beginning of his administration, before Sept. 11. "From the very beginning, there was the conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and he needed to go," O'Neill said in an interview broadcast on CBS' 60 Minutes on Sunday, Jan. 11. During the CBS interview, Suskind showed a document, supplied by O'Neill, which he said showed Pentagon plans to divvy up Iraqi oil after a successful invasion. O'Neill's characterization of Bush as "detached" was denied by Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld. "He drives the meeting, asks tough questions. He likes dissent," Evans told CNN. "I don't see any validity to (O'Neill's) criticism at all," Rumsfeld said. "I really feel fortunate to be working for a man of (Bush's) character and ability." It could be argued that Evans and Rumsfeld were shading the truth to protect their boss, were it not for the fact that their description of Bush is shared by Larry Lindsey, former director of the National Economic Council, who was fired at the time as O'Neill. So it seems more likely that O'Neill's distinctly minority view of Bush's leadership skills is "sour grapes," as Rumsfeld said, or part of an effort to hype the book. During the 60 Minutes interview, Suskind showed a document, entitled: "Foreign Suitors for Iraq Oilfield Contracts," which he said was a Pentagon plan for dividing up Iraq's oil after a successful war. This casts serious doubt on his - and O'Neill's - judgment and integrity. As Laurie Mylroie pointed out, this was not a Pentagon document. It was a document prepared for Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, and it was merely a list of existing and proposed "Iraqi Oil & Gas Projects." It was one of a series of reports on global energy supplies. To represent this as a plan for dividing up the spoils in postwar Iraq, as Suskind did, one has to be either an idiot, or a liar. O'Neill was backtracking furiously within 48 hours of the 60 Minutes interview, telling a clearly disappointed Katie Couric on the Today show that "people are trying to make the case that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration. Actually, there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration that there needed to be regime change in Iraq." Asked about his comment that Bush "was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people," O'Neill said: "If I could take it back, I would take it back." Web logger Daniel Drezner, who worked in the Treasury Department when O'Neill was secretary, said his former boss was repeating a familiar pattern. "The following would happen like clockwork every two weeks: O'Neill would say something he thought meant X, when if fact it could be interpreted as either X or Y - and Y is either controversial or wrong. The financial press would seize on the statement as suggestive of Y. O'Neill would have to issue a clarifying statement that he really meant X." The controversy has served to remind people of what a truly terrible Treasury secretary O'Neill was. "O'Neill's tenure at Treasury was marked by verbal gaffes and impolitic comments," wrote Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post. "He publicly disparaged Bush's 2002 imposition of steep tariffs on steel, roiled currency markets with his blunt talk, (and) enraged a Brazilian president." O'Neill comes across as disloyal, egotistical, clueless about the ways of Washington, and more than a little dishonest. His book will have little impact on Bush's reputation, but a considerable impact on his own.