Politics Blog

In the latest sign of Howard Dean’s growing strength, he leads Dick Gephardt by 10 points in Iowa, his largest margin yet. Gephardt was supposed to be the last great Dean-stopping hope of the Democrat party.

-- PoliPundit

Matt Drudge managed to eavesdrop on a Kerry campaign strategy meeting:

All of Dean’s money is coming from Republicans, one member of Kerry’s kitchen cabinet told the group. Another adviser asked if that had been researched. No one had an answer.

Well, there’s some truth to that story. I asked my readers to donate to Dean’s campaign in June, when it mattered most. (BTW, Newsweek asked me to comment about that on the record for their big cover story about Dean’s rise back in late July. I declined, since I prefer to toil in anonymity and help Dean become the next McGovern. So there, Viking Pundit! So much for being “self-referential”

Drudge continues:

The staffers talked about doing an ad where they would contrast Kerry’s anti-war activism with Dean as a draft-dodging ski bum. The ad would feature vault clips of Kerry speaking at anti-war rallies and testifying on Capitol Hill vs. Dean statements on how he could have served in the military, but decided not to.

Let me help them out. Here’s a photo of Kerry protesting the Vietnam War in the company of traitor Ramsey Clark.

-- PoliPundit

Back in June, I noted that Republicans have a real chance to become the permanent majority party:

As much as [the prescription drug benefit] repulses me, it has the potential to make the GOP the Governing Party.

Why is it important to be the Governing Party? Because, every time there’s an election, the other party has to make a convincing argument not to elect you.

…

If the economy turns around and there are no more significant terrorist attacks at home, Republicans will have proven themselves worthy of governing, even in difficult times. At that point they will go into elections with a built-in advantage against Democrats. It’s like having to choose between a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old when hiring for an important job. All things being equal, the 30-year-old will likely win because he is implicitly more mature.

Fred Barnes says the same thing; but he points out having that a governing majority isn’t all good:

The contrast between oh-so-serious Republicans and unhinged Democrats is a telling one. Republicans–many of them anyway, and especially Newt Gingrich–believe they’re acting, at long last, like a governing majority. Once a raucous band of outsiders, they’ve grown up since taking control of the White House and Congress and now expect to dominate Washington for years to come. Democrats, on the other hand, are frenzied, furious, and fulminating, just like Republicans of fairly recent vintage. The new Democratic trademark is the wild charge. This role reversal delights Republicans, but there’s a downside.

…

The biggest worry about a Republican governing majority is that it won’t act as a conservative majority. Gingrich says the goal is to be a “Reaganite governing majority.” But on Medicare, the Reaganite part was small. The promise of free-market competition under Medicare was delayed until 2010 and then limited to a trial run in six cities over six years. A lot can happen before then, including the election of a Democratic president (in 2008) bent on eliminating any tinge of privatization. If the drug benefit bill is the model of success by a governing majority, the passage of almost any sort of legislation is fine so long as conservatives get a few concessions.

The real test of the Republican majority will come next year and in 2005. White House officials insist the president will campaign for reelection on Social Security reform. Democrats will answer that he wants to privatize the entire Social Security system and jeopardize benefits. Bush didn’t buckle on this issue in 2000, but he didn’t win a majority of the popular vote either. Assuming Republicans retain control of the White House and Congress, will they enact the one Social Security reform that matters, allowing workers to use some of their payroll tax for private investments? If not, a governing majority is a conceit without conservative content.

-- PoliPundit

Two polls show Howard Dean leading John Kerry in… Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts!

More importantly, 33 percent of those polled think Dean is the strongest candidate to take on Bush, which means the “unelectable” argument isn’t selling among the Democrats who vote in primaries (see my earlier explanation for why this is the case.)

UPDATE: Yet another poll shows Dean leading Kerry by 9 points in Massachusetts.

-- PoliPundit

Way back in February, when Howard Dean was just a little-known former governor of Vermont, I wrote:

John Kerry is clearly the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination; but, in my opinion, the person most likely to beat him isn’t Joe Lieberman (too hawkish, too soporific), John Edwards (too callow, too ambulance-chaser), Dick Gephardt (too blonde, too bland) or Bob Graham (too crazy, too grandfatherly.) The person most likely to beat Kerry for the nomination is Howard Dean.

Now, of course, Dean is the front-runner and it’s up to his rivals to defeat him. Says Michael Barone:

At the November 15 Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, Kerry and John Edwards said that the party needs a nominee with answers, not anger. Gephardt and Joe Lieberman have struck similar notes. They hope to be the un-Dean–the candidate who survives Iowa, New Hampshire, and the gantlet of February 3 contests and then faces off against Dean in the big states starting with Michigan February 7. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi expects that someone will emerge as the un-Dean. And it’s not clear that in the big states Bush haters will outnumber more ambivalent Democrats. Either Dean or the un-Dean, whoever he turns out to be, could win.

Before they can beat Dean, the un-Dean Democrats have a serious problem to contend with: There are too many of them. Dick Gephardt could beat Dean in Iowa. John Kerry could beat him in New Hampshire. Weasel Clark could beat him in South Carolina. However, each of these un-Deans will have a difficult time distinguishing himself from the pack and surviving the assault that Dean will direct at him, now that Dean has opted out of public financing and can focus his large campaign resources on key states without any limits. Witness, for example, the attack ads that Dean is aiming at Gephardt, now that Gephardt appears to be the chief obstacle to Dean’s winning Iowa.

If Dean ends up winning Iowa and New Hampshire, the un-Dean vote in South Carolina might end up weak and split between neighboring-son John Edwards, retired General Weasel Clark, mushy “moderate” Joe Lieberman and the always-reminding-you-that-he’s-a-Vietnam-Veteran John Kerry. That would enable Dean to sweep the February 3 contests and make it impossible for any un-Dean to unseat him.

Barring a major stumble by Dean or a major leap by an un-Dean, Howard Dean is hurtling towards an inevitable victory in the Democrat primary and an inevitable debacle in the general election.

-- PoliPundit

As I’ve noted before, some smart Democrats have already come to the conclusion that their presidential nominee will lose every Southern state and will have to focus his efforts elsewhere. However, a few still balk at writing off the entire South:

Mississippi Democratic chairman Rickey Coles said: “Ignoring the South is no way to build a national party. That just allows the party to wither on the vine. All this ‘targeting,’ all this whimpering and whining about ‘limited resources,’ obscures the fact that even if the nominee wins the presidency without the South, he wouldn’t be a true national leader with a national constituency.”

That’s a moot point. The Democrat presidential nominee is virtually guaranteed to lose every Southern state.

-- PoliPundit

“These people have more support among the Arab media and in the studios of al-Jazeera than they do in Iraq.”

– Jalal Talabani, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, describing the Iraqi “resistance.”

-- PoliPundit

“The party that stole the election in 2000 now wants to steal patriotism from us.”

– Weasel Clark, commenting on the RNC’s ad airing in Iowa and New Hampshire. When a presidential candidate accuses Republicans of stealing the 2000 election, it demonstrates just how shrill the Democrats have become.

-- PoliPundit

The Pulitzer Prize committee has decided not to revoke Walter Duranty’s prize.

Duranty, you’ll recall, was the Old York Times correspondent who won the Pulitzer for his coverage of Stalin’s communist utopia in 1931. He covered up the deaths of seven million people from famine.

There is, of course, a double standard here. Can anyone doubt that a correspondent who covered up The Holocaust during World War II would have his Pulitzer revoked?

To this day The Times proudly displays Duranty’s Pulitzer. And hires foreign correspondents who make Michael Moore look rational. Consider, for example, the Times’ London correspondent Warren Hoge. Before you believe his reports on the “anti-war” protests in London, here’s a quote from Hoge:

America is now something of a rogue state, a pariah nation.

People repeatedly say it isn’t Americans we don’t like, it is just Bush. He pushes hot buttons. Bush has so much to do with this rather stupendous fall-off in American popularity. It is quite amazing to think where we were the day after September 11 and how much of that goodwill has been squandered.

And we’re supposed to trust people like Hoge to report the news fairly and objectively?

-- PoliPundit

Robert J. Samuelson says in the Washington Post that the economy is going to get better and it’s going to help the president’s re-election bid.

As I noted a few days ago, the third-quarter GDP growth rate is likely to be revised upward to as much as 8 percent.

-- PoliPundit