If the Democrats pick Dean, then we know they have collectively most their minds. It will be the most crushing defeat since Walter Mondale met the Reagan steamroller in 1984.
Regards, Ivan
Posted on 11/10/2002 1:18:32 AM PST by MadIvan
DEMOCRATS are desperately seeking a saviour. His name might be Howard Dean, the little-known governor of Vermont. It could be Warren Beatty, the actor. Some think it could even be a Republican — if John McCain, former scourge of President George W Bush, could be persuaded to change sides.
My first impulse on reading this was to laugh - Ivan
The only certainty for America’s bruised and demoralised opposition party last week was that a major rethink is required to confront the challenge posed by a hugely popular Republican president.
On Thursday the changes will begin with a Democrat vote for a new party leader in the House of Representatives. But the search is already under way for a credible presidential flag-bearer to lead the fight against Bush in the 2004 presidential poll.
As the debate over the party’s future unfolds, supporters are already turning their backs on their party’s old guard. The resignation of Richard Gephardt, formerly Democratic leader in the lower house, hastened a flurry of activity as three candidates jostled to replace him.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, a long-serving California liberal, is arguing for a more aggressive approach to distance Democrats from Republican policies.
Congressman Martin Frost, a Texas moderate, gave a warning that a hostile opposition risked being seen as obstructionist by voters who might turn the Democrats into a “permanent minority party”. But it soon became clear that most of his colleagues were ready to take the risk and Frost withdrew his name in favour of Pelosi.
The third contender is Harold Ford, a 32-year-old black congressman from Tennessee who was named by People magazine last year as one of the world’s 50 most beautiful people. “I think my colleagues on the Democratic side are interested in radical change,” he said. “My candidacy would offer a new generation of leadership.”
The bitter sequence of narrow losses last week has also transformed the Democratic presidential reckoning and opened the door to a dark horse candidate from outside the party’s Washington hierarchy.
Spurred by nostalgia for the explosive White House campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — both comparative outsiders who emerged late from regional obscurity to confound the national leadership — Democrats are suddenly considering an improbable line-up of long shots, oddballs and celebrities collectively dubbed ABAG (Anyone But Al Gore).
The former vice-president remains in the running for a second chance to challenge Bush after the Democrats’ excruciating defeat in the Florida fiasco of 2000. But Gore was the last name on party lips as disenchanted activists scoured the ranks of credible — and sometimes incredible — contenders. They need, as Donna Brazile, Gore’s former campaign manager, put it, somebody who could “come out and fight like an alleycat”.
The main beneficiary of Democratic disarray is Dean, a previously invisible governor from a northeast backwater state where, according to an old Vermont joke, there are only three seasons — winter, still winter and almost winter.
While the rest of the country remains focused on the war against terrorism and Bush’s daunting rise to domestic political dominance, Dean, a 54-year-old doctor, is quietly preparing a challenge.
He has been a successful state governor with an impressive list of policy accomplishments, notably in extending guaranteed healthcare for children. He is also one of the few leading Democrats to have attacked Bush’s policy on Iraq, suggesting the president is more concerned about oil than democracy in Baghdad.
“We have to stop being bullied by the right wing in this country and stand up for what we believe in,” Dean said last month. “The right wing doesn’t represent America.”
Until last week Dean’s presidential campaign was treated as quaint and quixotic. Despite a dozen visits to Iowa, where the presidential race will formally begin with primary caucuses next February, Dean was still so little-known that a magazine writer recently mistook him for a chauffeur.
The governor’s prospects are now changing rapidly as the Democratic leadership counts the cost of its botched mid-term campaign. Tom Daschle, the South Dakota senator who presided over the humiliating loss of the Democrat majority in the upper house, is judged by many in his party to have failed to offer voters a clear alternative to Republican policies.
Gephardt, a veteran Missouri Democrat, insisted that Democrats had done little wrong. “In this election, the determinant was quite simply September 11 and George Bush’s popularity,” he said.
But many other Democrats endorsed Gore’s call for a “major regrouping”. Gephardt and Daschle were widely accused of failing to exploit economic concerns and of succumbing too meekly to the president’s anti-terrorist agenda.
“All they have done is make Bush more popular and make it that much more difficult to attack him,” one Democratic analyst complained last week.
Other critics claimed that the party’s reluctance to criticise Bush had weakened its traditional appeal to lower-income Americans, racial minorities and the elderly. “Democrats need to disavow their politics of appeasement,” one party strategist said.
The lack of a clear policy alternative was blamed for other Democrat setbacks. Roy Barnes, governor of Georgia, had been regarded as a Jimmy Carter-like prospect from peanut country but was knocked out of the presidential running when he surprisingly lost his re-election bid.
Senator John Kerry, a highly regarded Vietnam veteran from Massachusetts, was easily re-elected but failed to prevent his home state from being won by a Republican governor. Kerry moved quickly last week to endorse a more aggressive Democratic approach. “We Democrats must have the courage of our convictions,” Kerry declared.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, the former vice-presidential candidate who used his chairmanship of a Senate committee to bash Bush on corporate corruption, also proved to be little use to fellow Connecticut Democrats who lost key congressional seats to the Republicans.
A similar setback befell Senator John Edwards, a North Carolina lawyer described by some as the party’s hope of the future. In the race for North Carolina’s other Senate seat, Edwards and other Democrats failed to exploit the campaign shortcomings of Elizabeth Dole, the vulnerable Republican candidate, and lost the chance of an upset.
The litany of muddle and missed opportunity extended to Gore, who earned praise for being brave enough to criticise Bush early in the campaign but made little difference to races where he intervened personally.
With Hillary Clinton continuing to rule herself out of the running for 2004 — though most Washington insiders believe she remains very much in harness for 2008 — many Democrats were hoping that Dean or another new face might emerge to lead the charge on Bush.
There was even talk of an outside celebrity candidate — Beatty has long been a Democrat favourite and is believed to have considered running for office. “He’s no more unlikely a candidate than Arnold Schwarzenegger as Republican governor of California,” one Democratic strategist observed.
Perhaps the most unlikely subject of speculation was McCain, the maverick Republican senator from Arizona who challenged Bush for his nomination in 2000. “My dream scenario is that John McCain becomes so appalled with the (right-wing Republican) feeding frenzy in the next year that he can’t stand it and bolts the party,” said Paul Glastris, the Democrat editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly.
While McCain, a liberal-minded centrist, has always played down suggestions that he might quit the Republican party, Glastris and other senior Democrats believe he has left a door ajar.
“It’s not that the Democrats have a bad field of candidates,” said Glastris. “They have some very able and impressive people. It is just that they don’t have anyone who can beat Bush. And McCain is the one guy who can beat Bush.”
If the Democrats pick Dean, then we know they have collectively most their minds. It will be the most crushing defeat since Walter Mondale met the Reagan steamroller in 1984.
Regards, Ivan
He was the state's Lt. Governor when the incumbent Republican governor suddenly died under mysterious circumstances which have never been fully explained...
Regards, Ivan
Here's the rub in the thirty years since liberals have taken over the schools collages the country's social structure so the natural order of things is that the new generations rebel, breakout and be couragous by becoming CONSERVATIVE -- think of the trends
Young blacks voting conserative, democratic stronghold of decades past going conservative, jewish voters increatingly voting republican
The best part is hollywood can't get off the rebel image. They are doing made for republican ads in the wold the liberals have created.
I know this is poorly worded and not fully thought out, but I think I'm onto something here.
Snelling’s fatal heart attack catapulted Lt. Gov. Howard Dean from relative obscurity to the public limelight. The 42-year-old Democrat, a Burlington resident with a medical practice in Shelburne, took the oath of office for the state’s top job at 3 p.m. Aug. 14, 1991, seven hours after his Republican predecessor was found dead beside his swimming pool.
Regards, Ivan
Rose colored glasses, wishful thinking, and Kool-Aid can do amazing things. 8^)
*sigh* Can't the British media get anything right about the American political process? Gephardt still is Minority Leader. He's simply not running for reelection to the post.
They also seem to be conveniently forgetting his stance on abortion issues. Half the special-interest groups that make up the Democratic Party would set the DNC building on fire if they found out McCain was running as a RAT.
Regards, Ivan
Report after report we hear the same thing, they just think it was some strategic snafu, some mistake, either by the voters or by Gephart. Fact is, Americans are sick and tired of their LIES. Anyway, the dems are going the way of the whigs. Once the nation gets to hear Pelosi spew her anti-American vitriol another 2-5% shift to the right will occur by 2004.
Dick Treacy to the rescue? *L*
So they thought down here in Georgia, but it didn't work quite as well as they'd planned. Much of the gerrymandering was done in backroom deals, and people got really disgusted with it.
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