Posted on 12/06/2003 6:30:40 PM PST by PeteFromMontana
Correspondents Report - Sunday, 7 December , 2003
Reporter: John Shovelan
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Well, staying in the United States, with the first Democratic primary just over one month away in Iowa, not one of the nine candidates seeking the nomination has won broad endorsement across the party.
While the former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, is leading in the opinion polls, the party establishment is yet to embrace him.
In fact, there's a growing view that if Howard Dean does win the nomination, President Bush could make a clean sweep among conservative southerners.
Underlining the uncertainty in the party, the man many Democrats still look to for guidance, former President Bill Clinton, doesn't appear to have found a candidate he can back.
Dick Morris, the architect of President Clinton's 1996 campaign victory, says it's all a bit academic, because George W. Bush is in an almost unbeatable position.
Dick Morris told our Washington Correspondent John Shovelan that despite the apprehension of the party hierarchy at the prospect of Howard Dean winning the Democratic nomination, there's nothing that can stop him now.
DICK MORRIS: It's very important to understand how he is getting that nomination, because it is a revolution in American politics. A revolution.
And it has nothing to do with his policies. It has to do with the methods he uses to get elected.
For years, our politics has been descending into bribery and corruption by the campaign contribution system. And as the cost of waging campaigns has increased, the amount of bribery going on through these campaign contributions has increased geometrically.
But at the same time that that's happening, the reason the cost of campaigning is going up is that fewer and fewer Americans are watching television. Television viewing rates among men under 40 years old are tiny in the United States these days. And people are watching cable without advertising, or they're online, or VCRs or whatever. Some are even talking to their family.
And the result is that you have only about a third of the people watching television with advertising. So the politicians are spending three times as much money on advertising to reach them.
But what Howard Dean did is he went with the voters to the Internet, and he developed a truly mass political base online.
So the average candidate for President, his opponents, Kerry and Clark and those guys, have 30,000 or 40,000 campaign contributors, Dean has 300,000 campaign contributors.
And I think that Internet base is going to serve him very well as he goes through these primaries. I think it's likely to animate a series of upset victories on his part, and I think he'll ultimately win the nomination.
I don't think he's going to win the election. I don't think he should win the election. But I think the contribution that he's made really marks the end of the media era in American politics, and the beginning of the Internet era.
JOHN SHOVELAN: You talked about some upset victories. Where do you see those?
DICK MORRIS: Well, I think he'll win the early primaries. I think he'll win in Iowa, I think he'll win in New Hampshire and I think then he'll go on and win most of the other states in the process.
It's kind of funny, you know, the Democratic Party leaders set up the process precisely to eliminate a Howard Dean candidacy. They didn't have him in mind, but some kind of left-wing guy coming in and capturing the nomination.
And the way they did that was to front-load the process, so all the really bit states have their primaries in the first six weeks. And they figured that anybody who came out of nowhere and won some early primaries wouldn't be able to get enough money and turn it around in time to be able to influence those big state primaries that come in the early going.
But what happened was in the early going, Dean raised more money than any of the establishment candidates did. So he's better equipped to survive till those big primaries and to win them. Kind of turning the process on its head.
JOHN SHOVELAN: But yet he's not going to beat George Bush?
DICK MORRIS: I don't think so. I think that in a sense he's God's gift to George Bush. He's pretty far over left on a whole series of issues.
And more importantly, Bush is structuring stuff so that he loses the election of 2003, but they don't hold it that year, but he's going to win the election of 2004 when they have the election.
The economy has been in terrible shape until this quarter, when it exploded with an 8.2 per cent growth rate and manufacturing at its peak. So the economy is going to come roaring back over the next couple of months and by a year from now the recession will be a distant memory.
I think that the war in Iraq he’s taking a lot of casualties now, but he's increasingly training the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police force, and I think that the US is going to start withdrawing troops by the middle of '04 and have a lot of them out of there by election day.
And finally, I think that he passed the prescription drug benefit, which is as significant for the Republicans as Bill Clinton's passing of welfare reform in the year before his election was to the Democrats.
For two decades it's been the quintessential Democratic position, that Medicare doesn't pay for prescription drugs and that it must. And they've had that football to kick around for a long time. Clinton tried to get it done but was not able to get it done, in part because his own party didn't want to lose the issue, they wanted to keep the issue kicking around.
And Bush got it done. And I think that what he's really done is to force the Democrats to wage the campaign in the past tense.
There used to be a recession. There used to be casualties in Iraq. There used to be no coverage for prescription drugs. And that's not a great way to wage a campaign.
JOHN SHOVELAN: Do you think there's any doubt that the Democratic Party would unite behind Howard Dean?
DICK MORRIS: Oh, I think it’ll unite in the sense that there won't be any third candidate running. But I think a lot of Democrats are going to find him too far to the left.
One of the big issues that's very polarising in the United States is the issue of gay marriage, or as the liberals phrase it, “gay civil unions”. And I think that that's a very dangerous issue for Dean because he signed the gay marriage, or gay civil union bill, when he was governor of Vermont. And that goes to the basic cultural divide.
There's a fascinating statistic in US politics. If you go to church regularly, or synagogue, you vote Republican two to one. If you don't, you vote Democrat two to one. And about half of Americans do.
JOHN SHOVELAN: Can the Democrats win without doing something about their vote in the south? Could you tell us a little bit about how the south is just swinging further and further Republican?
DICK MORRIS: Yeah. I think the south is pretty well gone for the Democrats. The Democrats really are likely to be shut out in most of the south, although not necessarily in Florida, where there’s huge amount of northern migration, where 20 per cent of Florida is new every five years. Literally, one out of five Floridians didn't live there five years ago. So that's a much more volatile state.
But I think that when you look at the broad electoral map, if the Democrats had run, or do run a decent centrist candidate, I think they would have a very good chance of winning the election. But they're not. They're going to go with Dean, who is way, way, way, way, way over left.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Dick Morris, speaking to John Shovelan in Washington.
A growing view among whom? Bush made a clean sweep in the South when he wasn't president yet and he was running against Al Gore from Tennessee! True, Al Gore wasn't really thought of as a southerner, he was from Washington, but that's besides the point. Dean is for sure not a southerner. Forget it. The South is sewn up for Bush, and Florida won't be close this time. However, Dean will win California and New York, as well as most of the rust belt states and New England, so I don't think it'll be a total wipeout. I do think Missouri and New Mexico will go for Bush, whereas they went for Gore in 2000.
A lot of it depends on how much of a flake Dean will be in the general campaign, assuming he is the nominee.
Pray for W and The Truth
True, but nothing he said here is totally off the wall or debatable really.
Dean is a sacrificial lamb... Frustration is really showing this go round for the liberal left. Hate and zero couth. Swing voters dont take to raving lunatics kindly.
Missouri-Bush 2000
Missouri went for Bush in 2000.
I have said this before and it bears repeating. Southern conservatives, atleast the ones I have encountered, are social conservatives, but not fiscally so. In fact, they are quite susceptible to the rich-bashing, class-envy populist themes of the Dean campaign.
Southern social conservatives are not the dyed in the wool, Ayn Rand reading, net surfing, super-informed, news-savvy conservatives like people here. I don't want to take them for granted in assuming they will vote for Bush. We need to work hard for every vote.
FR and other right wing organizations dominate the net today. The lefties started to get involved after it was too late for the last presidential election.
The Internet also forces the leftist press to cover a story they would just as soon omit since they don't further their leftist agenda. Bill Clinton would not have been impeached if it had not been for Matt Drudge and plenty of support on the internet. Morris is often wrong but I agree with him on the power of the internet.
The American hating leftists around the world haven't missed the right wing vehicle that the internet has become, by by passing the leftist lamestream media.
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com WASHINGTON – A global summit set for next week in Geneva is expected to provide the venue for a plan to put the Internet under United Nations control.
Developing nations – including China, Syria and Vietnam – are pushing for the U.N. or one of its agencies to regulate the Internet, perhaps as soon as 2005. Diplomats from more than 60 countries plan to take up the issue at the U.N. World Information Summit in Geneva beginning next Wednesday.
Don't forget, he's usually wrong.
Fortunately, he is not the strategist, just a comentator.
As a strict constructionist I'm certainly not motivated to fight my way to the polls.
Once you hear a full list of what Vermont's answer to Huey Long plans to do to the country, you will feel motivated to stop him.
So9
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