Posted on 08/26/2003 10:35:11 PM PDT by A_Niceguy_in_CA
Commentary by Bill Press
August 27, 2003
Breaking news! There is still a race for president of the United States under way. Contrary to what you see and hear in the media, the campaign for president has not been suspended until after completion of the California recall Oct. 7.
But if you accidentally happen upon any coverage of the presidential campaign these days, be forewarned. What you see will not be pretty. It's a replay of the Donner Party: Democrats eating each other. And the one they're feasting on most is former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.
The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) took the first bite. DLC founder Al From, who recruited Bill Clinton to bring the Democratic Party back from ruin, warned that Dean belonged to the party's "McGovern-Mondale wing" and would repeat their sad history by winning only two states.
Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, DLC president, dismissed Dean's criticism of President Bush with the taunt: "Do we want to vent or to govern?" Connecticut's Joe Lieberman, last year's DLC president, called Dean "a ticket to nowhere." And like rats following Pied Piper, most political pundits insist Dean is simply too liberal to beat George W. Bush.
They are all dead wrong. They underestimate the anger that most Democrats, and a growing number of Americans, feel toward this administration. Besides, Dean is not the wild-eyed liberal they paint him to be. And he definitely has what it takes to beat Bush.
Dean's not the only one. In my view, John Kerry and Dick Gephardt also have the right stuff. I haven't endorsed anyone in the Democratic primary, and as a practicing journalist I won't. But Dean is getting a bum rap.
Look at his record in Vermont. Dean governed as a genuine middle-of-the-roader. He refused to raise income taxes. He opposed gun control, for which he received an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association. He supported the death penalty. And even though it was not constitutionally required, he balanced the budget every one of his 11 years as governor — and even set aside a "rainy-day" fund.
Dean, in fact, governed as such a fiscal tightwad that in 1996, the DLC — the same organization that now denounces him as some neo-Vladimir Lenin — hailed re-election of "the centrist Gov. Howard Dean" as evidence of growing "New Democratic leadership."
True, Dean remains the only governor in the nation to have recognized gay civil unions, although California's beleaguered Gray Davis just promised to do so. But even there, Dean trims his sails. He signed the legislation only after the state's highest court ordered him to. He defends civil unions not as gay "marriage," which he still opposes, but as extending the same basic civil rights to all Americans.
Indeed, now that the Supreme Court has overturned Texas' sodomy laws and Wal-Mart has granted equal benefits to gay employees, Dean doesn't appear so radical on this issue anymore — just ahead of his time.
More than anything else, it's his opposition to the war in Iraq that sets Dean apart from the other candidates. John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards all voted for giving Bush authority to go war in Iraq. Dean opposed it from the very beginning as unwise and unnecessary. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction or any connection between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11, 2003, proves that Dean was right and the others were wrong.
Dean has a few other things going for him. He is a licensed physician, not a professional politician. He has a McCain-like gift for straight talk. He doesn't pussyfoot around his answers. He has demonstrated an astounding ability to raise money, especially from small donors on the Internet. And he's not afraid to tackle Bush head on. That's good. Democrats will never beat George Bush by running Bush Lite.
Bill Press is co-host of MSNBC's Buchanan and Press.
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, "In the Justices We Trust?" posted on FR, other publication to come.
As if anyone in America still believed that "journalists" like Press considered "objectivity" anything more than one more instance of dishonesty they spoon out to a public they disdain.
And then, any connection between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11, 2003
This tells you where the Democrats stand. They not only have lost the nerve to fight the war (if they ever had it), but their shills in the press can't even remember the godforsaken date.
Bill Press -- Quisling for a new century. (Does he know which century this is?)
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Stuff: another good word ruined by the Left.
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