The Democrats, long avatars of the circular firing squad, are again engaged in ritual self-marginalization. This time the object of scorn is Howard Dean, the man who is leading the other eight contenders for the presidential nomination in every category by which we keep score in preseason politics: polls, money and endorsements.
The party swells in Washington are tut-tutting about how Dean is just wrong, wrong, wrong for the party. He’s too shoot-from-the-lip. He’s too angry. He was born without an optimism gene. He’s too far to the left, a 49-state loser waiting to happen.
If Dean is so bad, one might ask, and yet is doing so much better than the rest of the nine-person field, then what does that say about them?
Each of the remaining eight, if they were successful enough to even warrant the criticism, could be lampooned in ways that make Dean look downright appealing.
Consider Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who seemed to live the delusion that he had automatic front-runner standing because he was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. So strong was the bond of that ticket that Gore has endorsed, ahem, Dean.
Holier than thou
Lieberman’s campaign has the most vainglorious premise, that he is the morally superior candidate on the race. Memo to candidate: You are running in the Democratic primary. Democrats don’t dwell on their righteousness. And how can that compete against a candidate, namely President Bush, who is on record saying that Jesus Christ was the philosopher who most informed his thinking.
What’s more, as the only candidate who has run a national campaign, how can Lieberman explain credibly why he is ducking the caucuses in Iowa, a state he and Gore won?
Sen. John Kerry would be an easy mark for other reasons. As the junior senator from Massachusetts, he can hardly shake the “Northeastern liberal” label. And try to get him to offer a simple declarative answer to any question. Or, at the same time, define what his big idea for the country is, despite his heavily labored rhetoric on any subject. Or that his only executive experience was serving as lieutenant governor to Mike Dukakis.
Case rested
And if experience matters, what does Sen. John Edwards offer? He was undeniably a great and wealthy trial lawyer, which would put him right up there with being the head of a pharmaceutical company or an HMO in the trifecta of voter revulsion. His brief career as a senator (he was elected in 1998 and has said he won’t seek another term should he lose the presidential sweepstakes) has been undistinguished. In fact, his most high-profile issue, trying to pass a patients’ bill of rights, ended in failure.
Failure is something that retired Gen. Wesley Clark knows. He’s one of only a few generals to get fired after winning a war. And it was a war in Kosovo, a place most Americans can’t find with a map. Even Edwards has a wealth of experience when compared with Clark, who decided that the first elective office he would seek would be the Oval. Clark, however, is the only major candidate so far to not put Dean through the shredder.
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Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri has the distinction of having run for president before, in 1988. He also has the distinction of serving as the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, presiding over his party when it was consigned to minority status in 1994, the first time since the Eisenhower era, and managing to keep it there even through Bush’s first midterm election.
Oh, him again
Gephardt was supposedly the candidate of labor–a good issue in the primary but less so in the general election–except for the fact that two of the largest unions, the AFSCME and SEIU, have endorsed, ahem, Dean.
Gephardt has been in Washington since Jimmy Carter was president, meaning that he has a voting record of nearly three decades for his fellow Democrats, not to mention Republican computer gremlins, to pick apart. He is hardly a fresh face and often it shows. If Dean weren’t currently wearing the hair shirt for being “too liberal” then surely it would be Gephardt.
Being too liberal is not a concern for the rest of the field, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and activist Al Sharpton. It is a point of pride.
Kucinich would pull all troops out of Iraq, cut Pentagon spending and establish a Department of Peace. He would also immediately abandon several international trade agreements. And no worries about mad cow disease for the vegan in chief.
Braun’s campaign seems to consist of attending candidate forums and debates. She has so little chance of winning that her opponents don’t even deign to engage her on the issues.
That’s not true for Sharpton, for whom speechifying, arguing and posturing is a well-practiced way of life. He would certainly be the candidate with the longest record of civil, and not so civil, disobedience.
How’s Dean looking now?