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For those who are interested, the top three vote
getters of the MoveOn.org web primary were as follows (out of 300,000 votes
cast, a number larger than some states, they noted): Kucinich 76,000
or 23.93% Kerry 49,973
or 15.73% Since no one candidate received 50% of the vote, each
registered voter is encouraged to give to the candidate they voted for before
the critical June 30th financial disclosures deadline. Also of interest, when voting, the
ballot also asked if we were united to defeat Bush, and then gave options to
check off which candidates or all of them the voter would support if nominated,
to run against Bush. The question remains, does voting this way help people
feel empowered, that ordinary folks have a chance to compete with big money
interests. Capitol Letter by Eleanor Clift: The Man To Beat
Howard
Dean, despite a bad showing on ‘Meet the Press,’ is still bringing in the bucks June 27, 2003 The phone rings in the
background. It's one of the Democratic candidates calling for money. The
lobbyist lets the call go into voice mail. "I can't tell you how many
phone calls I'm getting," he says. "I feel like that beautiful girl
in college who has everybody calling her." It’s
nearing the end of the second quarter filing period, and Democrats will measure
who's up and who's not by how much money they raised in the last three months. The buzz is that Howard Dean will post over $4 million. Two rival camps privately predict that Dean will come close
to $6 million. There is panic in the air.
Democrats on Capitol Hill see Dean and his anti-war populist campaign as "McGovern Redux." They worry he'll lead the party into a repeat of Democrat
George McGovern's 49-state loss to Richard Nixon in 1972. It's not that the war in Iraq was that
popular with Democrats. If the congressional resolution empowering
President Bush to invade Iraq had been a secret vote, many more Democrats would
have voted no.
But lawmakers fear the unknown,
and they don't know Dean the way they know the other contenders in the race. Plus he's running a campaign against them, and the way they
have accommodated a popular president. Democrats have won the White House only
twice in the last thirty years. Both
times it was by somebody who was not part of Washington. Governors don't speak Washingtonese. Whatever you think about Dean and his
cranky assault on the Establishment, you can't avoid the fact that he fits the
pattern.
Thanks to a little strategic
thinking and a lot of luck, the former Vermont governor is positioned as the
only outsider in the race at a time when Democrats have given up on insider
politicians. Dean says that when
he travels around the country, he finds that Democratic voters are almost as
angry at Democrats in Washington as they are at Bush. Dean appeals to the idealism in the party.
His theme -- "Let's take back
the country" --echoes Jimmy Carter's campaign call a quarter-century ago
for a government as good as its people. Like Carter,
Dean is not someone you would immediately peg as charismatic. But his edgy personality is reminiscent of John McCain, and his blunt talk gives him a Trumanesque appeal of the little guy who fights
back. When Dean first spoke out
against the war in Iraq, he did so in a political climate of 70 percent support
for the war. Analysts saw it as
political suicide. "How many
electoral votes are there in Iraq?" Dean was asked at one political gathering. "None," he fired back. "They're in Iowa." The centrist wing of
the Democratic Party is fighting hard to head off Dean. In the upcoming issue of the "New
Democrat" magazine, an editorial headlined "Why we fight" lays
out the case against a Dean candidacy. Without having read the piece, which is embargoed, I presume
it rests on Dean's opposition to the war as exposing the party's longstanding
weakness on national security. Not
long ago, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Vatican of the New Democrat
movement, pointed to Dean, a fiscal conservative, as an example of a successful
governor in the DLC model. The
DLC's change of heart appears principally based on differences over the war
with Iraq. After siding with Bush,
the DLC and the pro-war Democrats have a lot at stake in defending that
position regardless of the deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq and
the growing concerns about whether Bush misled the country in the run-up to the
war. What Dean's critics
find especially galling is how he is weathering his poor showing on "Meet
the Press," the premiere Sunday talk show. Host Tim Russert quizzed him on U.S. troop strength around
the world, caught him in Gore-style exaggeration on an anecdote about a teenage
girl seeking an abortion, and questioned whether he had the
"temperament" to be president. Dean appeared uncertain even when his facts were OK, and he
seemed annoyed at being grilled. By
all accounts, it was a terrible performance. "If he was Gephardt, he'd be out of the race," says
a Democratic strategist. But the
next day Dean presided over a hokey official announcement of his candidacy,
which drew a large press contingent and got him on all the news shows. "The rules don't apply to
him," says the strategist. "He
operates in a different universe. His supporters say, 'That mean Tim Russert,' and they send
him another $200 on the Internet." The terrible logic of the Democratic
nomination is that anybody who runs left enough to get the activists can't win
a general election. Dean has the centrist credentials to
maneuver his way back to the center, where he's probably more comfortable
anyway. His health care plan is
relatively modest, and he supported the carrying of concealed weapons in
Vermont. But Democratic
officeholders have a fear of the unknown, and when they look at Dean, they see
an angry liberal who will send them into the wilderness for another 25 years. Savior or spoiler, Dean has gone from a second tier candidate to the man to
beat. |
