Dean, Clinton and Kerry: No, No, No for 2008
Thanksgiving is traditionally an occasion for Op-Ed columnists to put aside their customary bile and offer up heartfelt thanks for the many blessings that we Americans share. But I say: Heartfelt thanks are what grandmothers are for. I'm going with bile. This week's topic is Candidates Who Obviously Covet the 2008 Democratic Nomination and Who Must Be Stopped at All Costs From Obtaining It.
Let's begin with Howard Dean. Most of us thought that Dean's spectacular defeat in the Iowa caucuses last January meant the end of him and his movement. Instead, it was more like the ending to "Terminator 2," where the evil robot is blasted to smithereens and presumed dead, then the fragments slowly regroup and come to life. As we speak, Deaniacs are reconstituting in their yoga studios and organic juice bars, plotting -- in their benevolent, cheerful but fundamentally misguided way -- to make Dean the leader of the Democratic Party.
Why would this be such a disaster? Because, remember, the Dean campaign advanced two novel theories about national politics. The first was that Democrats paid too much attention to winning over the center. What they really needed to do was mobilize the base by nominating a candidate like Dean who'd fire up liberals. This turned out to be doubly wrong. Democrats were fired up enough that they didn't need a Howard Dean to inspire them to unprecedented enthusiasm. And a fired-up Democratic base, volunteering and donating at unprecedented levels, was not enough to win.
Second, Dean argued that Democrats didn't really need to engage the cultural issues that Republicans had long used to win white, working-class voters. Instead, Dean argued, it would be better to persuade culturally traditional whites to vote their economic self-interest. But of course, a candidate can't always decide for the voters what issues they should pay attention to. Economics is complicated. Cultural issues are visceral. The presidential election showed pretty decisively that Democrats can't get a hearing on their more popular economic platform if voters don't think their values are in the right place. A secular Yankee like Dean is about the worst possible candidate.
Unless, of course, the alternative is Hillary Clinton. OK, maybe she wouldn't be worse than Dean. But she surely would go down in flames if she won the nomination in 2008. President Bush owed his victory in large part to cultural division. If there's anybody who incites cultural divisions, it's Hillary Clinton.
