Yearly Archives: 2003

It looks increasingly like the two main things between Howard Dean and the Democratic nomination are…his mouth and his temper. Given that a bunch of Democratic candidates have been excoriated for wimpishness (Carter, Dukakis, Mondale, Gore but importantly not Clinton), maybe this is the risk one has to take to have a winner. ABCNEWS.com : The Note, the purveyors and shapers of conventional wisdom, have 18 interesting observations about Dr. Dean. I was especially struck by numbers 8, 9, 14 & 18:

1. Dean will raise more money in the year before the election than anyone else seeking the Democratic nomination, and that historically in the modern era is (with one exception) the iron-clad predictor of who wins in both parties.

2. Beyond money, this year Dean has dominated in message and media, two other fabu things to have.

3. None of the other candidates can overtake Dean in the fourth quarter — they can theoretically do damage to him (although, outside damage with the Chattering Class, we doubt that too), but they can't cripple him. There just aren't enough people paying attention yet.

4. What doesn't kill Howard Dean only makes him stronger.

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Daily Kos flags a Washington Post article on a new Bush administration tactic to avoid pesky questions from Congressional Democrats — simply announce that you will no longer answer them. Henceforth, the White House wll only aswer questions approved by (Republican) committee chairs. This ensures that nothing troubling will be asked, solving the problem of both volume and content in a single stroke.

Abstractly, you can imagine a world in which the flood of informational requests from the Congress begins to overwhelm the White House, although there is no evidence that we had reached that point. If the White House's response had been some sort of quota system, eg. N questions per representative per month get priority attention, the rest go to the bottom of the pile, I might understand that. In fact, however, the policy seems to be a response to questions about the provenance of the shipboard “Mission Accomplished” banner that Bush has been trying so hard to disown recently.

This is just dirty. And so is this White House statement, “It was not the intent to suggest minority members should not ask questions without the consent of the majority.” Right. In which case Director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, should be fired quick, since he sent an email with a policy which can only be understood to do exactly that.

Given the unending stream of humiliations and provocations being visted on them, it would take saintly virtue for Congressional Democrats to refuse to retaliate in kind when, in due course, they become the majority party again. And while I tend to support Democrats more than other parties, I would not generally call them saintly.

Presidential candidates in decline can turn feral (actually, the same is true of any politician who feels the ground sinking beneath him or her). Dean is beginning to build an inevitability meme — or at least to grow his campaign to the point where (1) even smart analysts are afraid to bet against him (I heard an analyst on NPR today refuse to say that Dean couldn't win votes in the South, noting that Dean keeps beating his expectations), and (2) the campaign dynamic begins to be 'is there anyone other than Clark to become the ABD candidate'.

As the air gets sucked out of other campaigns, we'll see their real test of character begin. Will the candidates do the decent thing for the party and stick to the high road, even though it means likely defeat for their own candidacy? Or will they do the expedient thing, and do George Bush's work for him by going nasty, mean and negative?

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