First, thanks for the love. Second, don't count on the media playing it straight... the smart play is to plan for the worst and hope for the best. This is going to be an uphill battle all the way and the other side will do everything possible to hold onto power. It will be ugly and divisive beyond anything we've seen. And TJ, given some of your social views, it's not surprising you would express glee at hearing Mengele's name.
That's your version. The fact is purely that he changed his mind. Possible influences: * political gain, as you suggest. * revelation that intelligence was distorted and manipulated, evidenced, so far, by the scarcity of WMD stockpiles. * evidence that the administration had not planned effectively for post-war scenarios. et cetera. There are different views of this.
The Weekly Standard weighs in. worth the read: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/474ndwvi.asp?pg=2 -- How Dean Could Win . . . From the December 9, 2003 Washington Post: It could happen. Here's how. by William Kristol 12/09/2003 11:00:00 AM GOING INTO THE FINAL DAY of the college football regular season, Oklahoma was undefeated and ranked Number 1. The Sooners had the best defense in the nation, had outscored their opponents by an average of 35 points and had a 9-game winning streak against ranked teams. "OU: Among best ever?" USA Today asked (rhetorically) on Friday. Kansas State, by contrast, had three losses, and had never won a Big 12 championship. Oklahoma was favored by two touchdowns. Kansas State, of course, won, 35-7. For the next 11 months, Republicans, conservatives, and Bush campaign operatives should, on arising, immediately following their morning prayers, repeat that score aloud 10 times. Underdogs do sometimes win. Howard Dean could beat President Bush. Saying you're not overconfident (as the OU players repeatedly did) is no substitute for really not being overconfident. And if Bush loses next November, it's over. There's no BCS computer to give him another shot at the national championship in the Sugar Bowl. Could Dean really win? Unfortunately, yes. The Democratic presidential candidate has, alas, won the popular presidential vote three times in a row--twice, admittedly, under the guidance of the skilled Bill Clinton, but most recently with the hapless Al Gore at the helm. And demographic trends (particularly the growth in Hispanic voters) tend to favor the Democrats going into 2004. But surely the fact that Bush is now a proven president running for reelection changes everything? Sort of. Bush is also likely to be the first president since Herbert Hoover under whom there will have been no net job creation, and the first since Lyndon Johnson whose core justification for sending U.S. soldiers to war could be widely (if unfairly) judged to have been misleading. And President Bush will be running for reelection after a two-year period in which his party has controlled both houses of Congress. The last two times the American people confronted a president and a Congress controlled by the same party were in 1980 and 1994. The voters decided in both cases to restore what they have consistently preferred for the last two generations: divided government. Since continued GOP control of at least the House of Representatives seems ensured, the easiest way for voters to re-divide government would be to replace President Bush in 2004. And with a plurality of voters believing the country is on the wrong track, why shouldn't they boot out the incumbent president? But is Dean a credible alternative? Was Kansas State? Dean has run a terrific primary campaign, the most impressive since Carter in 1976. It's true that, unlike Carter (and Clinton), Dean is a Northeastern liberal. But he's no Dukakis. Does anyone expect Dean to be a patsy for a Bush assault, as the Massachusetts governor was? And how liberal is Dean anyway? He governed as a centrist in Vermont, and will certainly pivot to the center the moment he has the nomination. And one underestimates, at this point when we are all caught up in the primary season, how much of an opportunity the party's nominee has to define or redefine himself once he gets the nomination. Thus, on domestic policy, Dean will characterize Bush as the deficit-expanding, Social Security-threatening, Constitution-amending (on marriage) radical, while positioning himself as a hard-headed, budget-balancing, federalism-respecting compassionate moderate. And on foreign and defense policy, look for Dean to say that he was and remains anti-Iraq war (as, he will point out, were lots of traditional centrist foreign policy types). But Dean will emphasize that he has never ruled out the use of force (including unilaterally). Indeed, he will say, he believes in military strength so strongly that he thinks we should increase the size of the Army by a division or two. It's Bush, Dean will point out, who's trying to deal with the new, post-September 11 world with a pre-September 11 military. But what about September 11? Surely Bush's response to the attacks, and his overall leadership in the war on terrorism, remain compelling reasons to keep him in office. They do for me. But while Bush is committed to victory in that war, his secretary of State seems committed to diplomatic compromise, and his secretary of Defense to an odd kind of muscle-flexing-disengagement. And when Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., said on Sunday with regard to Iraq, "We're going to get out of there as quickly as we can, but not before we finish the mission at hand," one wonders: Wouldn't Howard Dean agree with that formulation? Indeed, doesn't the first half of that sentence suggest that even the most senior of Bush's subordinates haven't really internalized the president's view of the fundamental character of this war? If they haven't, will the American people grasp the need for Bush's continued leadership on November 2? If not, prepare for President Dean. William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard.
BREAKING NEWS: Howard Dean receives another powerful endorsement! It is with great pleasure that I endorse Howard Dean to be the next President of the Confederate...errr I mean United States of America!
Anyone catch where the endorsement took place? Harlem. Gore helps Dean incredibly in the black community. If he campaigns for Dean like he said he would, look for him to pay particular attention to minorities. Huge for Dean.
The ironic thing is that the BCS looks like a paragon of fairness and democracy next to the electoral college system.....
You know, it was Democrats who went to the South and asked blacks, "What has the GOP done for you since Lincoln?" Dean wants to ask lower class whites "What has the GOP done for you on jobs and health care and education?" Make fun of it and underestimate it as much as you want.
A Libertarian view... ____________ Governor, You're No George McGovern Why Howard Dean might be the next Bill Clinton Jonathan Rauch Howard Dean—the former Vermont governor who is leading the Democratic presidential pack—is a suicide pill, too left-wing to win. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. "Unless he changes course dramatically, Dr. Dean looks the wrong man for the Democrats," says The Economist. Many observers liken Dean to George McGovern, who steered the party off a cliff in 1972. In fact, George McGovern likens Dean to George McGovern. "In the candidacy of Howard Dean," reported The New York Times last month, McGovern "hears echoes of his own." Don't bet on it. I spent several days recently poring over Dean's speeches and other public comments. The conclusion was not as expected. The Dean campaign may be set to the music of firebrand liberalism, but its words belie the notion that Dean has painted himself into a far-left corner. Even on Iraq—his signature issue—Dean has planted himself subtly but distinctly to the right of his supporters. Dean's faithful believe the war was wrong, wrong, wrong. Dean seems to agree. "Had I been a member of the Senate," he said in a speech in February, "I would have voted against the resolution that authorized the president to use unilateral force against Iraq—unlike others in that body now seeking the presidency." In late November, he ran an ad saying, "I opposed the war in Iraq, and I'm against spending another $87 billion there." High-octane stuff; but Dean has been more cautious on Iraq than his enthusiasts realize. For example, in that same February speech, he went on to say, "I do not believe the president should have been given a green light to drive our nation into conflict...without a requirement that we at least try first to work through the United Nations." That sentence contains some artful phrasing. In reality, Dean favored an alternative war resolution (sponsored by Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind.) that differed little from the one that passed. True, Biden-Lugar called on Bush to seek a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the war, but it did not require Bush to obtain such a resolution, if the Security Council balked. In other words, Dean favored a congressional resolution authorizing exactly the course that Bush took. "Howard, I think you're all over the lot on this issue," said Rep. Dick Gephardt in a November debate. "All over the lot" is a bit of an exaggeration: Dean made no secret of his opposition to military action after Congress gave Bush a green light. Still, Dean's anti-war posture was less clear-cut—or, if you prefer, more nuanced—than his reputation and rhetoric suggest. In hindsight, Dean's position was not coherent, but neither was it pacifist or hard-left. Dean touted his support for the 1991 Persian Gulf War and for Bush's attack on Afghanistan. He took care not to renounce unilateralism. "I am not among those who say that America should never use its armed forces unilaterally," he said in his February speech—one of several such statements. In an Associated Press interview that month, he said: "I am not in the no-way camp. Definitely not. I think Saddam must be disarmed. The problem I have is that I have a deep reluctance to attack a country unilaterally without a pretty high standard of proof." Dean said he believed Saddam "may well" possess chemical and biological weapons. What he had not seen, he maintained, was sufficient evidence that such weapons posed an imminent threat. Shortly after Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a speech to the United Nations, presented the administration's evidence of the Iraqi menace, Dean said: "I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the secretary, but rather by its sketchiness." Going to war, Dean said, requires either an international consensus or smoking-gun evidence of an imminent threat—not necessarily both, but one or the other. The Bush administration had neither. Dean's position was incoherent because it called for containing Saddam through continued inspections, which continued only because of the threat of unilateral force that Dean would have withdrawn. That contradiction will come back to bite him if the Bush administration looks triumphant in Iraq next summer and fall. Bush will say, "If Howard Dean were president of the United States, Saddam Hussein would still be president of Iraq." Dean will go down. If, however, the situation in Iraq looks dismal in eight months, Dean's position will look pretty good. He will say he favored prudence over both pacifism and recklessness. He will remind voters that he said, in October of 2002, "The president has never said what the truth is, which is if we go into Iraq we will be there for 10 years.... The president must tell us that before we go." Dean will be able to position himself as the prescient moderate. On domestic policy, Dean has even more room to maneuver. Fiscally, he is to the right of where Bill Clinton was in 1992. Clinton, as everybody soon forgot, ran as a big-spending, heavy-handed liberal. He wanted to require all but the smallest companies to spend 1.5 percent of their payroll on employee training. He wanted $80 billion for new public works. He promised universal health coverage for free. He promised all sorts of new tax breaks. He ducked the deficit. By contrast, Dean describes himself as a fiscal conservative who balances budgets. "I'm a thrifty person," he said in a July speech, "and I hate waste and inefficiency." Howard Dean, meet Calvin Coolidge. On health care, Dean is solidly in the Democratic party's center, with a health plan that is less ambitious and less costly than Gephardt's—to say nothing of Clinton's. A National Journal panel of experts gave Dean's plan a "moderate [score] for the numbers of uninsured Americans [it] would pick up." On trade, Dean is to Clinton's left, demanding that trade pacts be renegotiated to include labor and environmental standards. Even here, however, he has given himself some room by suggesting that the standards might be set by the International Labor Organization, not necessarily by the United States. In any case, Dean's domestic policies, taken as a group, arguably place him to the right of candidate Clinton. Has Dean mortgaged his future to his far-left supporters? Doubtful. Liberals' enthusiasm for Dean is not necessarily the same thing as Dean's enthusiasm for liberals. He governed as a moderate in Vermont, and his two decades in politics mark him as a centrist, a fact with which he would ceaselessly regale his audiences beginning the day after winning the nomination. Even if he has "drunk the Kool-Aid of his own campaign" (as one political observer put it), he will have plenty of time to swallow the centrist antidote next year. Most voters, apart from fierce Democratic partisans, will not tune in until then. As for those fierce Democratic partisans, they will tolerate any kind of repositioning in order to defeat Bush. In the heat of battle, all that will matter will be Dean's status as Our Side's Guy. The passion and loyalty that Dean is building on the left today will not so much tie him down as free him up, securing the same sort of trusting base, and therefore the same sort of license to shift toward the center, that Ronald Reagan enjoyed in 1980. As evidence that progressive Democrats will forgive Dean for all kinds of impurities, I offer the fact that they are already doing so. On June 17, in a statement to the progressive Web site MoveOn.org, Dean said that the doctrine of "pre-emptive war" was wrong and dangerous; he promised to "tear up the Bush doctrine" on his first day in office. On June 25, in a speech before the establishmentarian Council on Foreign Relations, he instead criticized only the "misuse" of the doctrine, saying it "is not a comprehensive strategy." The Left didn't mind. On September 4, Dean said America's troops in Iraq "need to come home." The Left didn't mind five days later when, asked if he would favor a troop pullout, Dean said, "We can't do that. We cannot lose the peace in Iraq... If we leave Iraq to chaos, Al Qaeda may move in." Nor do progressives seem to mind that Dean calls for universal health insurance while proposing no such thing. Nor, indeed, do they mind his support for a Senate resolution that would have authorized Bush's war on Iraq. The Left loves Dean because he stands up to Bush and does not seem like a fast-footed career politician. If in actuality he is a fast-footed career politician, as the record suggests—well, so much the better. Being one without seeming like one is political gold. Ask Bill Clinton. The point is not that Dean, should he win the nomination, will beat Bush. The point is that Dean is no pushover. Republicans chortling that Dean would be the next McGovern had better watch out: He may be the next Clinton.
A source close to Lieberman said Gore, who was Clinton's vice president, did not call Lieberman to inform him of the decision. That was really cold and reflects very poorly on Gore.
Even if it's true, we don't know the whole story. Lieberman is such a cancer to the party, he can receive abuse now, as far as I'm concerned. He should really switch parties, and if that rumor is true, I hope Al Gore is nudging him.
I don't want him to switch parties, but I want him to get out of the race. That, i think, is what Gore is nudging him to do.
I totally agree, the scarier prospect is having a candidate from the House or the Senate because they have no credit on the major issue which is the war. They cannot write off their support of the war with just saying that they were duped by the evidence. There were more mistakes in giving the president a blank check on going to war than just the intelligence. There is the fact that no one bothered to question an exit strategy, the fact that we went in with almost no support and now we are going back to the U.N. Why would Americans vote Bush out of office for someone who just chose to follow him blindly. Also, I like the fact that the guy tends to speak his mind, rather than carefully spewing the same rhetoric. The Democrats cannot win with a guy who isn't going to stand firm, which is a percieved strength of Bush. The Republicans also won't be able to run a campaign of who can you trust more, which is what they did in 2000. I'd rather have a guy who puts his foot in his mouth, than a guy says what people want to hear.
David Broder from the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/09/opinion/09BROO.html -- The Mysterious Stranger By DAVID BROOKS y moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people. . . ." Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him. It was then that I saw how Dean had liberated himself from his past, liberated himself from his record and liberated himself from the restraints that bind conventional politicians. He has freed himself to say anything, to be anybody. Other candidates run on their biographies or their records. They keep policy staff from their former lives, and they try to keep their policy positions reasonably consistent. But Dean runs less on biography than any other candidate in recent years. When he began running for president, he left his past behind, along with the encumbrances that go with it. As governor of Vermont, he was a centrist Democrat. But the new Dean who appeared on the campaign trail — a jarring sight for the Vermonters who knew his previous self — is an angry maverick. The old Dean was a free trader. The new Dean is not. The old Dean was open to Medicare reform. The new Dean says Medicare is off the table. The old Dean courted the N.R.A.; the new Dean has swung in favor of gun control. The old Dean was a pro-business fiscal moderate; the new Dean, sounding like Ralph Nader, declares, "We've allowed our lives to become slaves to the bottom line of multinational corporations all over the world." The philosopher George Santayana once observed that Americans don't bother to refute ideas — they just leave them behind. Dean shed his upper-crust WASP self, then his centrist governor self, bursting onto the national scene as a mysterious stranger who comes out of nowhere to battle corruption. The newly liberated Dean is uninhibited. A normal person with no defense policy experience would not have the chutzpah to say, "Mr. President, if you'll pardon me, I'll teach you a little about defense." But Dean says it. A normal person, with an eye to past or future relationships, wouldn't compare Congress to "a bunch of cockroaches." Dean did it. The newly liberated Dean doesn't worry about having a coherent political philosophy. There is a parlor game among Washington pundits called How Liberal Is Howard Dean? One group pores over his speeches, picks out the things no liberal could say and argues that he's actually a centrist. Another group picks out the things no centrist could say and argues that he's quite liberal. But the liberated Dean is beyond categories like liberal and centrist because he is beyond coherence. He'll make a string of outspoken comments over a period of weeks — on "re-regulating" the economy or gay marriage — but none of them have any relation to the others. When you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there. For example, asked how we should proceed in Iraq, he says hawkishly, "We can't pull out responsibly." Then on another occasion he says dovishly, "Our troops need to come home," and explains, fantastically, that we need to recruit 110,000 foreign troops to take the place of our reserves. Then he says we should not be spending billions more dollars there. Then he says again that we have to stay and finish the job. At each moment, he appears outspoken, blunt and honest. But over time he is incoherent and contradictory. He is, in short, a man unrooted. This gives him an amazing freshness and an exhilarating freedom. Everybody talks about how the Internet has been key to his fund-raising and organization. Nobody talks about how it has shaped his persona. On the Internet, the long term doesn't matter, as long as you are blunt and forceful at that moment. On the Internet, a new persona is just a click away. On the Internet, everyone is loosely tethered, careless and free. Dean is the Internet man, a string of exhilarating moments and daring accusations. The only problem is that us rural folk distrust people who reinvent themselves. Many of us rural folk are nervous about putting the power of the presidency in the hands of a man who could be anyone.
actually, i don't think the democrats can win with a candidiate who won't support the war. I agree, it'll be the predominate issue, and i think there are clearly alot of angry leftists out there who will vote for him, but anger isn't a policy. what would dean have done? left sadaam in place to continue his reign of murder, rape, and torture. i look forward to his trying to explain that stance: Anti-war=Pro Sadaam. Extremely Logical. If the democrats voted for someone who unequivocally backed the war, and the war on terror in general, then attacked Bush on the handling of the aftermath and his admin's profligate spending habits, they'd have a real chance. but not w/ this guy. not saying it won't be close, but the dems lose w/ dean. hello Hillary in '08!
Democrats aren't going after Republican votes. Who cares if most Republicans were for the war -- those votes have already been cast. Most liberals and moderates were against the Iraq war, and those are the votes who will win Dean the presidency.
actually, i don't think the democrats can win with a candidiate who won't support the war. I suspect all of the major Democratic candidates NOW support the war/occupation. They see that the US can't say mulligan and try to get the War on Terror on the second try. They realize that we are in Iraq and will need to stay until Iraq has a stable government.
Dean would have done the same thing, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton done with Sadaam, contain him. Bush made Sadaam an issue. I guess Bush is pro Kim Jong because he hasn't attacked North Korea. He's also pro nuclear weapons in the hands of dictators.
