Kevin Drum notes that the cornerstones of the Dean campaign are, as I have been saying, anger and arrogance. He doesn’t use those words, but that is the gist of the post.
Twice in one day Calpundit and I completely agree on something. Call technorati, or guiness, or someone.
Moe Lane
John, I’ve been posting on your site for a while now. Our paths cross here, at Tac’s place, over at NGD and even at dKos before it all went screwy over there. I like to think that we’re on good terms, and I’d hate to think that you were holding out on me regarding critical information.
Thus, as one VRWC-following Right Wing Death Beast to another, I ask you: how in the HELL did this meme of ‘all bad posts are from Right-wing Operatives’ get started among the Left? Do they have hard proof, a particular site that brags about doing it, a weepy Usenet confession, anything? – and, based on Cal’s thread, why hasn’t anybody noticed that they don’t even particularly /need/ Operatives to start dissent in the ranks, seeing as that, given the chance, apparently they’ll enthusiastically do it to themselves?
Either way, if there’s a vast program in place to discombobulate the Left, dammit, I want my cut. Art is art – but business is business.
I’m just saying, that’s all.
Sean
anger and arrogance…the delayed bush response to 9/11 you mean? but hell, if you’re angry about something that genuinely sucks, and you’re arrogant (otherwise known as “confident”) regarding something you’re right about, hell..what’s so bad about that?
as my good man harry truman put it in 1948, “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it– don’t you forget that! We’ll do that because they’re wrong and we’re right, and I’ll prove it to you, in just a few minutes!”
angry and arrogant, and i love it.
Dean Esmay
I’ve been saying for some time that Howard Dean is the Democratic Party’s Pat Buchanan.
Incoherent rage and resentment and animosity are the driving force behind his campaign.
If he wins the nomination, he will either have to pivot away from all that, and alienate many of his supporters in the process, or, he will scare the bejeezus out of everyday voters and be crushed next November.
He is not a good candidate for Democrats, in any sense of the word.
For Dean supporters: righteous fury feels very good. So does heroin. That doesn’t make it healthy.
Dean Esmay
Oops. I meant “self-righteous fury.” Whatever.
Kimmitt
I’ve been saying for some time that Howard Dean is the Democratic Party’s Pat Buchanan.
Then you’ve been maligning a good man for some time now.
blaster
Mmm-mmm. Guiness.
Francis W. Porretto
Dean is merely a component in the strategy most commonly employed by a party out of (executive branch) power under circumstances like our current ones. He’s not a basic indicator of trends by any means.
Dean is the George McGovern of our era. The Democrats can’t afford to waste their only nationally viable candidate — Hillary Clinton — on the 2004 election. She’d likely be defeated, which would make her damaged goods and undercut her chances in 2008, when she’ll have a real chance against a non-incumbent. So they’ll toss up a candidate who, while he has little chance of winning, will, through his campaign themes and statements, reassure the Democratic base that the party is still “there for them,” as McGovern did.
The Democratic base is composed of special interests, and is therefore heavily redistributionist. And Howard Dean suits those folks to a T.
Sean
hillary clinton’s unfavorables are up in the 40-45 range…it would be stupid for her to try to run for president, and she never will. she’s doing a fine but unspectacular job as my senator right now, and thats where shes staying – we don’t really want her doing anything else. it’s just an incredibly strange conservative dream that they might one day actually beat a clinton in an election, and redeem themselves for their pathetic failures of the past…give up the fixation, guys. dean’s running, and he just might beat ya.
Sean
and if you think dean, a guy who has proposed raising the social security age, instituted welfare to work before it was national policy, refused to raise some taxes, and balanced his budget for 12 years, is a “redistributionist,” (although all government is about the distribution and redistribution of resources) then you have one warped view of politics. god forbid you ever run into dennis kucinich – i dont know if your circuitry could handle a real honest to god socialist.
Andrew Lazarus
Someone will have to explain to me real slowly why HRC is our only viable candidate. I think that has more to do with an obsession with the Clintons than anything in reality. It’s like saying of the 2000 Election, “With all this peace and prosperity, we can’t win, so we’ll run George W. Bush not to waste our one viable candidate, Tom DeLay.”
I am not at all sure Dean would lose like McGovern; I sense some wishful thinking there. I can believe that he is not the single strongest opponent for Bush. Until he actually made his debut, I’d have said that was Clark. What I AM sure of is that without the anger at GWB expressed by Dean, the Dems would have had no chance in 2004. I wonder if Clark would even have run. Until his rivals saw that Bush-bashing gets attention, has succeeded (along with many other factors) in a sea change in the press and public’s view of GWB’s competence and honesty, and raises the hopes of the base of the Democratic Party, they were all (well, excepting Kucinich) running colorless, GOP-lite, let’s not attack the Wartime President no-hope campaigns. None of them would have stood the slightest chance against Bush, with the sort of dispirited campaigns they were running.
Francis W. Porretto
Sean, Kucinich is a non-starter for many reasons, as you’re probably already aware. Yes, he’s more redistributionist than Dean, but he’s also completely ****ing nuts, and has demonstrated so in public often enough that only fellow inmates at his asylum would vote for him. Besides, no one has made the jump from the House to the Presidency in more than a century. And by the way, I went to college in the Sixties and Seventies; I’ve known more “honest to god socialists” than you could possibly imagine.
Andrew, Hillary Clinton is the Democrats’ only viable candidate in 2004 for the same reason Bob Dole was the GOP’s only viable candidate in 1996: there are no competitors with a sufficiently national image to have a shot at taking the prize. Each of the current crop of Democratic contestants has worked brutally hard to achieve broad recognition and distinguish himself from the pack, and at this point the only one of them most Americans can name is Joseph Lieberman — because he was on the ticket in 2000.
How does a Presidential aspirant achieve sufficient national recognition? It isn’t easy. All of the following seem to be required:
— You have to attach your name, very publicly, to at least one major national issue that commands the attention of the electorate for a significant time near to your campaign. It helps quite a lot if you win.
— You have to attract the benevolent attention of the major media, and persuade them, however that’s done, to focus on your positive qualities and your leadership potential.
— Your party has to concede that you’re one of its leaders, and permit you to build your image to some degree at its expense. Put another way, you cannot be seen as “a Democrat,” but as “the Democrat,” or at least as one of a very small group of such. One of the “traditional” routes to this is giving a major speech — the keynote speech or the nominating speech — at a leap-year party convention.
…and even all this, while necessary, is sometimes insufficient.
One of the reasons Campaign 2000 was so close was that Bush had insufficient national recognition. He won almost solely because of Al Gore’s shockingly poor performance in the debates. They were a true disaster for Gore, who had run an indifferent-to-poor campaign, had committed a large number of public gaffes, and was already carrying a lot of Clintonian baggage plus the taint of some very dubious fundraising practices. Simultaneously, they gave Bush, then a relatively unknown governor whose principal political asset was his family name, just enough extra public exposure to get him over the top.
Of course, it’s still early in the race. The media will have a great deal of influence over who rises and who sinks. But indications to this point are unfavorable toward all of the Democratic Ten. No matter which of them were selected today, if the election were held at once, the Democratic nominee would be lucky to finish as well as Michael Dukakis did in 1988.
Andrew Lazarus
Francis, I would agree with you that Gore did badly in 2 of the 3 debates.
On the other hand, exposure to Bush’s policies seems to be doing less and less for his re-election chances.
I’d like to point out that under your formulation of a viable candidate, Bill Clinton should have lost big in 1992. He was almost completely unknown nationally at the start of the Dem primary campaign.
Kimmitt
Mr. Drum has chosen to “partially retract” his statement, whatever that means.
Francis W. Porretto
Andrew, indeed he was, but he had the advantages of:
— running against a candidate who had alienated his base, very badly, with a sheaf of broken promises;
— running against a candidate who was losing votes to a third-party candidate who had much less effect on Democratic voters,
— the first really major outpouring of support from the entertainment industry,
— worshipful media, who seized on him as the next Democratic Party icon in the pattern of John F. Kennedy, while not giving his opponent the time of day. Even the Gennifer Flowers scandal rebounded to his advantage, on the Qaddafi Principle: “I don’t care what they say about me in the papers as long as they spell my name right.”
Bush the Elder helped Clinton to beat him in 1992. Clinton seized the opportunity Bush’s alienation of his base and the rise of the Perot phenomenon provided. Remember, Bush’s predecessor was Reagan. Reagan voters elevated Bush primarily on the strength of Reagan’s endorsement…and withdrew their support upon deciding that Bush was not Reagan’s proper inheritor. (This is something Republican voters are much more likely to do than Democratic voters are.) Of course, the media’s decision to push Clinton’s candidacy helped as well.
In that sense, Bush the Elder provided a goodly part of the the fuel that made Clinton a nationally recognized figure. Arguably, had the Democrats nominated Paul Tsongas instead of Clinton, he, too, would have defeated Bush, and for the same reasons, although he probably would have shown a thinner margin of victory.
Andrew Lazarus
I would say that Bush the Younger has done a lot to help XXX defeat him in 2004. Remember his promise to keep the budget in surplus? His Administration claimed months ago that we would be drawing down to 30-40K troops in Iraq now? And the media, which gave him an absolutely disgraceful free ride, is turning.
I’m getting more and more optimistic. If only we could get Perot to run again. Although, amazingly, Dean shows some of the same knack for energizing the “radical center”—angry voters whose policies aren’t particularly extreme.