The Washington Dispatch says Howard Dean will alienate the "Reagan Democrats" that helped Reagan win in 1980 and are still a political force in American electoral politics. Nolan Finley of The Detriot News agrees that moderate Democrats have little to like about Howard Dean.
Dean has captured the Democratic field, and at this point, the chances of another candidate taking the field is slim to none. Kerry is sounding more like a blowdried and contrived imitation of Dean. Liberman is persona non grata with the radical anti-war left. Edwards is promising, but his campaign has been stuck in neutral so long that he’s so far a non-factor in the race. Granted, anything could happen, but all signs point to a sweep for Dean unless his campaign somehow collapses between now and the critical New Hampshire and South Carolina races. If Dean wins these two contests as well as Iowa and some of the other Super Tuesday states, it’s hard imagining how any of the other candidates can come back. In fact, if Kerry does not win New Hampshire, it’s all but over for his candidacy.
Dean is a one-trick pony, and his one trick is capitalizing on the Democrat’s boundless hatred for George W. Bush. His policies have no resonance with the American electorate – his health care plan is identical to the failed HillaryCare plan of 1994, and his opposition to all tax cuts including those for the middle class is pure electoral poison.
The only thing that powers Dean is hate and bitterness towards the President. His core constituency are those who think that Bush is really a Hitler, that America is a police state, and that the war in Iraq was all about oil.
In other words, unless you’re a member of the radical left, Dean has no appeal whatsoever.
It’s that rabidly anti-war, anti-growth, anti-family, anti-military, and anti-American radical fringe that is the power that has vaulted the Dean campaign from an also-ran to the Democrat to beat. It is their pent-up rage and hatred that keeps Dean in the polls. They represent a minority of overall voters, but enough of a plurality for the Democrats to get the nomination.
Either Dean takes the nomination or the 2004 Democratic National Convention will degenerate into a riot as the hard-core Deanites try to hijack the convention for Dean. Dean is arrogant enough that if he looses, I would not put it past him to run as a Green. In such a situation, the split in the Democratic vote would ensure a second term for Bush.
In the post-September 11 age, the old slash-and-burn politics of mass destruction won’t fly. The Dean message doesn’t speak to voters who don’t already hate Bush, and those Democrats who aren’t part of the radical fringe will either vote for Bush or stay home on Election Day. Either way, Dean is political poison for the Democrats, and those moderate Democrats have nothing to like about Loud Howard taking the helm of their party.
“In the post-September 11 age, the old slash-and-burn politics of mass destruction won’t fly.”
That’s funny. They sure seemed to work for Saxby Chambliss when the GOP compared Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for not rubber-stamping Bush’s union-busting Homeland Security Department bill. Similarly, politics of mass destruction also worked in the increasingly frequent GOP attempts to wage jihad against their own dissenting members, as they did with George Voinovich when they compared him to the French and Saddam Hussein for not supporting Bush’s second round of budget-busting tax cuts for millionaires in the midst of a budget-busting unilateral war. Ultimately, Voinovich succumbed to the GOP’s bloody sword.
Dean’s “poison” towards Bush pales in comparison to the vitriol the GOP is capable of doling out in the name of patriotism. The Republican party’s ruthlessness has only grown stronger “in the post September 11 world”, so I hope your statement that these slash-and-burn politics won’t work anymore because if they don’t, Republicans won’t win another race for years. It’s easy for Americans to be coerced by nationalist hit men when they’re not burying their sons, daughters and neighbors….but when the GOP tries their 2002 approach in the current abysmal reality (as they are sure to), the results are likely to be decidedly different. As poorly as Bush is doing, I would even give Dean a solid chance of taking him out at this point….and that’s saying something considering how otherwise unelectable Dean is.
The Democrats might as well have the patent on malicious campaigning – after all, it was the left that ran the abhorrent James Byrd ads in Texas and routinely accuse Republicans of being a bunch of evil plurocrats who want to strangle old ladies and feed the poor to their pack of baying curs. The rhetoric of the Democrats is about as balanced as a fire-and-brimestone Baptist preacher with a nasty case of paranoid delusions.
And your post exactly proves my point – the only rhetoric that the Democrats have is that all Republicans are evil, Bush is evil, tax cuts are evil. The Democrats have more invective pointed at Bush than they had for Saddam Hussein.
This kind of whiny, petulant, and viciously partisan attitude doesn’t fly in America. If all the Democrats can do is snipe at the President then they don’t deserve to be in power. It didn’t work for the Democrats in 2002, and it sure won’t work in 2004.
Right now Bush has a popularity rating of 57% and higher ratings on economic issues than any Republican in the last 50 years. The Democrats are heading straight into the political wilderness, and quite frankly, if this is the way they’re going to choose to act, they can stay there.
The Republican party compared Democrats Max Cleland and Tim Johnson, along with Republicans George Voinovich and Olympia Snowe, to mass murderers Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein because these lawmakers respectfully disagreed with the President’s stance. As disgusting as the James Byrd NAACP ad was, it pales in comparison to directly comparing your domestic political opponent to the enemy in a time of war is a thousand times worse. The Democrats can behave like slimeballs as well, although I don’t think Dean is anywhere near that point yet, but there is no chance that the Dems will ever be able to out-Coulter Coulter and her bloodthirsty like-minded brothers and sisters of the right.
And if you honestly think that Bush’s popularity plunge has bottomed out even as his reckless house of cards is tumbling everywhere around him, you must be on the same drugs Johnny Depp is.
Again, Bush’s popularity has remained constant for the last 40 days. There is no "popularity plunge" in the President’s ratings despite the constant stream of negativity and invective from the liberal media.
So far the only one to demonstrate an unwillingness to acknowlege reality is you. After all, you still believe that trade costs job and all rich people are Republicans despite being hammered over the head with the truth that neither proposition is true. Being a liberal apparently means never having to admit you’re wrong.
Bush’s popularity was in the low-to-mid 60’s two months ago, and is anywhere from 52% to 57% percent….and these were in polls taken before the latest foreign policy embarrassments, before he gave the nod to increase air pollution, and before people start losing overtime benefits. And his re-election support numbers are considerably lower than his approval rating, indicating that many people feel an obligation to support a President during wartime even if they don’t think he’s worthy of a second act.
In regards to the debate on job creation due to free trade, I’m perfectly willing to let my real-world facts and figures stand on their own and let the Jay Reding-wishful-thinking figures flounder adrift in your faux fantasy world. As for the idea that most rich people are liberal, if I see more data to support that than one questionable election return spreadsheet, I will concede my incorrectness on that issue. If the “super rich” are the Democratic Party’s primary constituency, and you continue your defense of their entitlement to tax cut after tax cut after tax cut that they caan donate back to the Democratic Party campaign coffers, then you’re a much bigger idiot than I thought.
Jay,
You have failed to address Mark’s post regarding the smears of Max Cleland. Why don’t you explain why a man who sacrificed much of his body for his country deserves to be treated so disgracefully?
Mark: You had no real-world facts and figures. You were confronted with evidence from muliple sources and you responded with nothing more than your typical blind dogma.
As for Democrats and campaign finance even The New York Times finds that 92% of donations from people making $1 million and above go to the Democrats. The reason why millionaires support more taxes is that they can afford to pay them while most of those who are lumped in with "the rich" can’t.
In other words, you’re wrong, you’ve been called on it, and your response has been to deny the evidence. You’ve lost the argument, and the more you flail away and try to lie your way out of it the more pathetic and dogmatic you look.
ttam: I don’t support what was said about the former Senator by certain groups, but his position on stalling the Homeland Security bill was simply wrong and would have hurt the ability for this country to defend itself against terrorist attack. The fact that he served in the military and his physical condition didn’t do anything to make his position any less wrong.
He was compared to Osama ben Ladin. This is as offensive as Bush being compared to Hitler. “Certain groups” is the current Senator of Georgia. A lame come-back Jay. Objectivity looks good on partisans
Jay, as stated, I’ll let my statements on trade stand on their own valid feet. I can point to 17% of all manufacturing jobs lost in the past three years…..more than a million of which have been lost in the two-year-long “recovery” period. What can you point to? Steel industry “analysts” saying “all is good…don’t panic…the free market will save us”. I think more people will be convinced by my figures…especially those losing their jobs who you care about less than the dogshit on the bottom of your shoe.
And if 92% of millionaires are Democrats, by all means, keep insisting on cutting their taxes month after month, year after year. I guess I should re-evaluate my position on this issue if every penny of these tax cuts is going to Democratic campaign coffers as you insist…while pleading for even more tax cuts for them so that your party will be at a disadvantage. Real believable, Jay.
ttam, Jay avoided the Max Cleland topic as long as possible because he knew he had been beat. Nothing Howard Dean has ever said comes remotely close to the “slash-and-burn politics” the GOP practiced against Cleland. Jay knows it, and that’s why he ran from it for so long….and then producing a manipulated half-assed response when he did finally get around to replying nearly 36 hours later.