(no subject)

[yesthattom]

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah howard dean was right and would be beating bush right now, fuck you all and go to hell blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Comments

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

Meh. Yes, if somehow Howard Dean were the Democratic nominee and the Bush campaign somehow didn't know that and kept to the "running against a flip-flopper" playbook that they're currently using against Senator Kerry, then yes, Dean would be in the fast lane. Heck, so would Kucinich or Mosley-Braun or most anyone else you would want to name.

But play fair if you're going to be hypothetical. The Bush campaign would run a different campaign agaisnt Dean -- he can't control his temper, his Bush-bashing could easily be cast as anti-American and anti-troops, and do we really want to have a First Lady with a career? It could easily have been a disaster of Mondalian proportions if Dean was as unprepared for the spotlight as he was during the primary.

It's true that I'm not as excited about the future that Kerry would bring in the way that I was in 1992, but at the same time I think that we have a very credible candidate who is capable of regaining momentum and getting Bush defeated. And, while I respect the right to free speech, dissing Kerry when the electoral college vote is still very turbulent doesn't help that momentum. I guess it depends on whether you'd rather have a Democratic president or four more years of going to hell down a greased poll so that Dean can save us in 2008....

[cos]

Actually, this is what a lot of us foresaw in the fall/winter of 2003. Dean had pretty much singlehandedly forced the Democratic primary to be about real issues, instead of the usual trivialities, and the only way other candidates were able to challenge him was to talk about real issues. That was part of Kerry's big turnaround - he started talking Dean-talk.

In early 2004, I was far from the only one who wrote this prediction: If Kerry gets the nomination, many of the Democrats' best attacks on Bush will be neutered, because Kerry will have a hard time making them credibly. No Child Left Behind will drop off the campaign radar, because Kerry supported it and all he can say is that it ought to be funded - not much of a prescription for real debate about Bush's disastrous education policy. The Iraq war is a very strong issue against Bush, if we have a candidate who actually opposes it completely. Kerry seems to be trying to turn himself into that candidate now, but look how long it has taken him, how difficult it has been, and how much of a free pass on Iraq Bush has gotten out of it.

Kerry was, and remains, the weakest of the credible candidates the Democrats fielded in the primaries. Nobody who had a chance at the nomination was as weak (unless you believe Gephardt ever had a chance, which I don't). When facing Kerry, it's not so hard to turn the campaign into the kinds of trivialities Bush wants it to be about. If Bush were facing Dean, he wouldn't have been able to do that - he'd have had to face Dean squarely on the issues. If you look at Dean's history, that's one very consistent thing about all his campaigns: he always defines the debate, and the debate is always about real issues.

In the primaries, other Democrats were able to neutralize Dean's issue advantage by adopting, or pretending to adopt, many of his positions. That option would not be available to Bush - he can't act like he's opposed to most of his own policies.

I do believe, and always did, that Kerry can beat Bush. However, I also believe, and have throughout the past two years, that Kerry's ability to beat Bush is much less than Dean's.

[lovingboth]

Quite, and if Dean couldn't beat the shower that were the other Democrat hopefulls, what hope would he have had against Bush?

not a valid comparison

[cos]

Running against your own party in the primary, and running in the general election, don't compare. Dean actually withstood the primary onslaught very very well, and it boded well for his chances in the general, IMO. He was defeated primarily by the most partisan Democrats, the ones for whom beating Bush was top priority, above and beyond any one issue or characteristic of the candidate, and too many of these people allowed themselves to be fooled into thinking Kerry was the better general election candidate. They were wrong, but they got their way. None of that has any bearing on how moderates, swing voters, and new but non-party voters, would have made up their mind in the general election. The people who voted for Kerry in the primaries are by definition the very people who would go all out to support whoever the Democratic nominee was.

Also, especially, remember that Iowa decided the primaries. Running against your own party in a caucus election is especially difficult, since there are very few voters (about 2%-3% turnout) and the majority of them are active in the party. The Iowa Democratic Party was strongly in favor of Kerry. But if Dean had won, they'd be working to elect him now.

[shakal.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[publius-ovidius.livejournal.com]

I'm voting for Kerry, but only with great reluctance. I was (and am) definitely a Howard Dean supporter. Actually, I would have supported Kucinich if I didn't think he had a female's chance in the US Air Force Academy snowball's chance in hell.