Friday, July 25, 2003 :::
Lily Malcolm points us to a New Republic column saying, essentially, that the Democrats should avoid picking Dean because he's too liberal. The conclusion, though:
Indeed, while Dean's personal style apes McCain, his candidacy structurally resembles that of another insurgent: Steve Forbes. Both Forbes and Dean were the opposition party's ideal nominee. (The GOP equivalent of an antiwar liberal from Vermont is a right-wing millionaire from horse country.) Forbes, like Dean, took advantage of his outside-Washington status to batter more electable opponents for their inevitable compromises. (GOP nominee Bob Dole blamed his 1996 general-election defeat on the pounding he endured from Forbes in the primaries.) Like the Forbes campaign, the primary effect of Dean's insurgent run will be to make it harder for his party's eventual nominee to adopt a broadly popular platform without disappointing the activist base. And, without doing that, no Democrat can deny George W. Bush another--potentially catastrophic--four years. No wonder Karl Rove is chortling.
The flip-side of this, of course, is that if Dean does win the nomination, he can spend the general election going after the center -- emphasizing his opposition to budget deficits and gun control, while downplaying some of his liberal ideas and selling the others -- without worrying about his base. As long as he doesn't flat-out contradict what he told them during the primary, they'll remember that he's one of them. His position on the war in Iraq, and national security in general, might sink him, but it seems entirely possible either that people will no longer place as much importance on the matter, or that he'll be able to convince them that he's right (or some of each).
I haven't actually seen the man in action, but I worry that he's not so much a McCain of the left or a Forbes of the left, but a Reagan of the left. I'm not certain of it, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if I were certain of the opposite.
::: posted by Steven at 1:01 AM
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