Howard Dean really isn’t a liberal. I know this because Al Hunt
said so.
In his Wall Street Journal column last
Thursday Hunt dismissed Democrats who are worried that the rise of
Howard Dean means the Democratic Party is “at risk of being taken
over by the far left.” Rather, Dean is a man who defies the
conventions. According to Hunt, Dean’s “chief passion is fiscal
moderation,” and on “some other issues he is to the right of the
center of the Democratic party.” Indeed, Dean is so not
liberal that “Ted Kennedy has cool feelings towards” him.
So why is Al From, chief of the centrist Democratic Leadership
Council, so down on Dean? Hunt maintains it has nothing to do with
ideology and everything to do with power: “After Bill Clinton and
Al Gore, Mr. From fancies himself a kingmaker, and Dr. Dean hasn’t
supped sufficiently at his table.”
Here’s an alternative theory: In his gut, Hunt knows that in the
ways that are likely to count in November 2004, Dr. Dean is a
liberal. He’s worried that Dean may have gone so far left that the
Democrats are headed toward a Mondale-McGovern meltdown. Thus, he
(along with a lot of the mainstream media as of late) needs to get
a jump on defining Dean as a moderate now, before those awful
Bushies have a go at him.
Hunt is right to be worried. The substance for the “Dean is
really a moderate” claim comes from his record as Governor. But his
days as chief executive of Vermont are likely to be a tangential
issue in 2004. What matters more is his strategy for courting
primary voters. All Democrats running for President face the same
problem: how to appeal to a left-wing base in order to win the
primary, and then how to become more moderate to appeal the “Great
American Center” in the general election. While Dean’s strategy to
win the primary is looking more brilliant by the day, it portends
disaster for the general.
Currently, Dean’s chief passion doesn’t appear to be “fiscal
moderation” but rather Bush bashing. After all, Dean isn’t
emphasizing spending restraint in the commercials currently running
out here in Iowa. This works wonders now, as the Democratic base is
rabidly anti-Bush. But to work in the general, Dean will have to
hope for a major drop in Bush’s popularity. Given that polls show
Bush is still popular with a majority of Americans, that’s a lot to
hope for.
On taxes, Dean couldn’t have done worse than if Karl Rove had
somehow managed to brainwash him. By promising to repeal
all of the Bush tax cuts, he has permitted the Bush
campaign to talk about how much more a middle-class family of four
will pay in taxes under a President Dean. Perhaps he could have
gotten away with it if he had only promised to raise taxes for
upper-income folks, while offering a Clinton-like $300 tax cut for
the middle class. Too late now.
On national security, Dean is even worse. Not only did he oppose
the war in Iraq, but he has been loose-lipped about it. Upon the
death of Uday and Qusay, he creepily hinted that U.S. troops had
gone too far when he said, “I think in general the ends do not
justify the means.” And on the liberation of Baghdad he made the
now infamous remark “I guess getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a
good thing.” This is a cornucopia for whoever writes ad copy for
the Bush campaign.
Hunt dismisses this as “simplistic formation.” As evidence, he
writes that Dean’s opposition to the war was mirrored by “such
foreign policy heavyweights as Zbigniew Brzezinski and a few
leading officials of the first Bush administration.” He also notes
that Dean “wants to undo the Bush tax cuts and return to the rates
that prevailed during the Clinton administration, hailed then by
centrists.” Can there be a better archetype of the
inside-the-Beltway mentality? Apparently Hunt believes that the
folks out in Peoria care what Jimmy Carter’s national security
advisor thinks and will say to themselves, “You mean my taxes will
only go up to what they were under Clinton? I’m okay with
that.”
Howard Dean’s strategy for the primary revolves around bashing a
popular president and challenging him on two issues, taxes and
national security, that will be GOP strengths in the general
election. That will make it very easy for the Bushies to paint him
as a man of the left. The likes of Al Hunt can argue until the cows
come home that Dean really isn’t a liberal. That only proves one
thing: self-delusion is still the second-most favorite indoor
sport.
