You mean the far far left, Sterra. Based on the biased sample of this message board, the only leftists who aren’t Dean supporters are those that think Dean will lose the general. Are there any leftist non-Dean supporters out there who want to contradict me?
I kind of agree. Clark would be a good vice presidential choice for Dean, geographically speaking, but I’m not sure about Edwards. Edwards is made of that fabled presidential timber, but I think the North Carolinians find that he’s still too green. There’s a sentiment in his home state that he needs to spend more time locally before leaping on to greater prizes. The man’s still in his first term, after all, having spent only five years in an elected office. (I’m sure feelings would be different if Senator Edwards’ dad had been able to play a bigger part in his career, though…) Edwards as a presidential candidate might carry North Carolina, but as a vice presidential candidate—at this time—might have some trouble doing even that.
Of course, there’s always Bob Graham, the man who’s “running for vice president.” He could surely help Dean in the South. But even if Dean chooses a fellow non-Southern moderate (like Governor Vilsack of Iowa or Senator Durbin of Illinois or Senator Binghaman of New Mexico,) he’d still probably do well in Florida, at least.
I agree that Dean does have the humor and charm to do well on the campaign trail, and in front of the TV cameras. Better still, Dean comes across as thoughtful and informed and engaged in the policies that he’s espousing. And the civil unions question will turn out to be a red herring. The Bush/Cheney ticket will lose a lot of traction with civil libertarians if they try to force Governor Dean to take a hard line on issue—because Dean will, forcing Bush to explain just how he feels about gays and the right to privacy. If it becomes an issue to smear Dean with, it’ll backfire—which is why I don’t think it’ll become an issue in the first place. Besides, as Sterra pointed out, Vice President Cheney is in favor of civil unions. Most Americans are tolerant of gays, which puts Bush in a difficult position when it comes to appealing to his far-right supporters and the all-important moderates.
Well, I didn’t write the “Deany Babies”. If I have something to say, I contact the person involved to say it. I don’t know how you do that, but to me that is the normal procedure. The normal procedure is further that if you contact someone you receive a reply when that person received a decent upbringing.
And if you want to know which countries border the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea you can find that on a World Map.
So what’s the problem? Is it an other Command of The Group to post your whole personal life and your locations in order to get “accepted” by The Rulers? You people keep amazing me.
If such remarks -and the above- are a reflection of your normal posting style, do you mind if I ask you how old you are?
Salaam. A.
The logical result of this would be that the primary is a completely useless election, and third party candidates (or fourth, or fifth, depending on how many you allow in the final election) are barred from the actual election.
“Deanie Babies” is the nickname for the Dean supporters that I’ve heard used in New York–if they don’t want it to stick (and I wouldn’t if I were them) they’d better get cracking on a new name for themselves. 
I just turned 39 years old, but you bring out the little kid in me!
Did you receive “a decent reply?”
Dogface, I don’t follow how this would protect the smaller states. I mean, if half the CA voters vote for, say, Lieberman, and every single voter in VD, VT, and MT voted for Dean, by your system wouldn’t only Lieberman go to the General Runoff anyway?
Not to mention the nightmare of counting it–we screwed it up last time with only two candidates.
I am not voting.
Whoever the “people in power” want in will be put in.
Maybe folks are starting to realize that recently.
But I encourage others not to vote.
Both candidates will do as they are told.
Though i may write in someone…
Conan O’Brien?
The fact that the Democrats seem to feel that they’re entitled to the any vote that is not for Bush (witness the Nader comments) isn’t going to help them a lot either. Whining that Nader voters cost them the last election without attempting to do anything about Nader voters’ issues is not, IMO, the best strategy for winning over Nader voters.
Well, OK, but isn’t one of Nader’s main points that it doesn’t matter which of the two main parties you vote for? So why should the Dems run the risk of alienating their mainstream by courting voters who by definition do not believe it’s any use to vote for them?
<boy, do I sound kvetchy in this thread! But I do have questions…>
Oh help… I realize that I’m a so called Deany Baby and I’m not even American…
I get suicidal… This is too much…
So… after Florida… who thinks that the Green Party is going to lose a lot of protest voters?
I think it just shows that Democrats have to present a credible difference to Bush. Nader said that he wont run if Dean sticks to his message and wins the nomination.
Here’s one man’s comparison between Kucinich and Dean: http://www.bobharris.com/kucinichdean.html
He supports Kucinich because he feels Dean is waffling on support for gay marriage legislation, opposition to the death penalty, and support of the Kyoto treaty, among many other things. Many progressives feel they shouldn’t compromise by supporting a middle-of-the-road candidate. That line of thinking is more appropriate for countries with parliamentary coalitions, IMHO, but I can’t imagine too many progressives will stay away from the polls in protest and let Bush win just because Democratic candidate Howard Dean doesn’t fit their views exactly.
**Well, OK, but isn’t one of Nader’s main points that it doesn’t matter which of the two main parties you vote for? So why should the Dems run the risk of alienating their mainstream by courting voters who by definition do not believe it’s any use to vote for them?
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Because, according to a lot of Democrats, it was people voting for Nader that cost Gore the last election, therefore, the Dems need to get those votes in the next election. If the Greens don’t see a difference between the two parties, then the Democrats ought to offer them a difference or highlight what difference is there. Alientating Nader voters by saying that they’re unreasonable asses and that it’s their fault Bush is in office is not the most brilliant strategy for getting them to vote for the Democrats I’ve ever heard of, though making nasty comments about the mothers of Nader voters would probably be worse.
It’s natural to use the 2000 Presidential election as a basis for analyzing what will happen in 2004. However, IMHO the country has moved on, and the 2002 election is a better guide. Based on 2002, the Democrats need to find a way to demonstrate a commitment to fighting the war on terror. Otherwise, they cannot win. There is a core of Nader voters and liberal Democrats who are anti-war, but this group is a minority. Appealilng too much to them is a dead end.
But even as we speak, december, the concept of “anti-war” is undergoing change. Note well the difference between being opposed to “a war of neccesity, compelled by the urgent need to disarm a dangerous regime” and “a war of mendacity, compelled by an urgent need to retain a dangerous regime”.
Patriotic fervor runs deep in our national psyche, Americans are loathe to think ill of a man who can wrap the flag around himself and blubber about his love for “our troops”. There is no comparison, there is no rival as a method for concocting instantaneous approval ratings. It never fails.
But it wears thin, as time goes on, and the truth dribbles out. We went to war to protect ourselves from a chimera, from a nuclear armed pink unicorn. Careful examination under our bed and in our closet reveals a glaring absence of Boogeyman. Nothing could make this clearer than the current Bushista campaign to “memory hole” our motivations from self-defense to a noble campaign to rid the world of a tyrant.
If America sees GeeDubya for what he is…a mediocre man with no special talents and a substandard set of principles… (In Dennis Millers words “who surrounds himself with intelligent advisers like a doughnut hole surrounds itself with doughnut”) he is in deep trouble.
GeeDubya will have to rely on image. Look for more photo ops with military settings, GeeDubya speaking before adoring crowds of military personnel, jutting out his chin and delivering defiant one-liners, carefully vetted to remove any taint of substance.
It might work against Dean. But not against Kerry. Kerry is the genuine article, a combat veteran with glittering medals. Bush is a Rear Echelon Mothefucker, who defended the skies above Amarillo from Viet Cong aircraft until it proved to be inconvenient.
With an electorate as evenly divided as ours, this could be enough to seal GeeDubya’s doom.
There’s logic to this position, but I don’t think the public mind works this way. The voting public is selfish. They’re not interested in grading Bush and Kerry on their military service. They’re interested in themselves and their own security. That’s why Georgia Senator Max Cleland lost re-election on the issue of national defence, even though he was a war hero.
But december, Cleland didn’t lose because he was running on the national security issue. He lost because he was running on the national security issue and as a Democrat who promised to be all snuggycuddles with George W. Bush, if reëlected. While it was scummy of Chambliss to call Cleland’s patriotism into quesiton during the election, the fact is that Cleland lost the election by running as a shade of Republican. Likewise Shaheen and Carnahan lost their bids for the same reason, and Tim Johnson almost lost his.
The Democrats had no leadership in 2002. There was no Democrat calling Bush out, there was no unity. The Democrats didn’t present themselves as actually standing for anything, and it cost them. Cleland might have won reëlection if he’d had a Democratic platform to run on, but frankly, a Democrat who uses the image of Bush himself in his television commercials deserves to lose. Had there been a unified Democratic voice in Congress in 2002, the outcome wouldn’t have been so disastrous.
During a presidential election, there’s always someone standing up and defying the president, of course. At least one person. From my vantage, that at-least-one-person will either be John Kerry or Howard Dean, and the congressional Democrats will have someone to stand by when campaigning. That will help to unify the Democrats’ message next year. How well they’ll do it remains to be seen, but predicting anything right yet is a fool’s bet.
If the American people understand that Bush lied to Congress and to the world about Iraq’s non-existant nuclear weapons program in order to embroil us in a bloody quagmire, then Bush is in trouble. If there’s no apparent progress in Iraq from now until next fall, then the Democrats definitely have an issue. And if the economy doesn’t pick up (which massive tax cuts are supposed to instigate, I understand,) then Bush had better ask his dad to help him update his résumé, because someone else is going to have his job.
2000 saw two conservatives running as moderates, and (logically enough) a deeply divided electorate. 2004 will probably see something very different: the conservative Bush trying hopelessly to run as a moderate and the moderate Dean or the moderate Kerry running successfully as a moderate. If either wins, Dean or Kerry could later prove to be something other than a moderate, but they both have that unknown-quantity appeal until they’re elected. Bush has proven himself to be a conservative, which will make it more difficult to sell himself to moderate voters, if there’s a moderate Democratic candidate going after them—which there most likely will.
elucidator, I agree that Bush will have to rely on image in 2004. Really, that’s all he’s got. Convince the voting public that there’s no there there, and Bush is done.
I have trouble buying that idea. Bush was awfully popular in Georgia, so coming out against Bush must have looked like a losing strategy to Cleland.
You describing it as Chambliss questioning Cleland’s patriotism. If Chambliss had actually done that, he would have been creamed, because it would indeed have been scummy. Actually, Chambliss criticized Cleland’s lack of support for national defence against terrorism. That was a winning issue. The voters cared about their own security, not Cleland’s patriotism.
It’s true that the Democratic incumants who were defeated tended to be moderate. That’s because they came from moderate states with competitive elections, not because they weren’t liberal enough. Liberal Democratic Senators from liberal states were secure in their reelection.
This is true. However, it’s a pretty normal situation in an off-year election, yet the President’s party normally loses seats in an off-year election.
I think there will be progress in Iraq. However, I agree that the Dems would have an issue if there were no progress. In order to capitalize on the issue, they would have to offer an alternative policy. They couldn’t defeat Bush just by carping. What would that alternative policy be? Should they run on a platform of promising to withdraw from Iraq?
Even so, this was scummy, since Cleland voted consistently with the Bush agenda, which Chambliss was purporting to support. Frankly, I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the two candidates, except that Chambliss resorted to dirtier tricks. I wish they’d both lost.
Not exactly. Though conventional wisdom had him leading by a couple of points toward the end, Wellstone was right down to the wire for much of the campaign. Apart from him, the only liberals running for reëlection in liberal states were arguably Kerry and Reed, and possibly Durbin, if you want to call Illinois liberal. But that’s a whole other discussion.
Sort of. I would say that in an off-year election, the party that doesn’t control the White House typically still has leadership. The Democrats in 2002 were in disarray, which is why the unusual situation of the party that held the White House gaining seats during the first term of an administration came to pass. The Republicans were certainly unified in 1994 and 1978, as were the Democrats in 1990 and 1982, and the respective parties gained seats in each of those years.
Certainly not! The Democrats need to run on a platform of 1)honesty (as in not lying to the people about intelligence we’ve allegedly garnered), 2) openness of government in general (within reason), and 3) a promise to broaden international coöperation in Iraq and a peaceful conclusion to what’s now a bloody quagmire. Merely carping on how Bush screwed up isn’t going to do it, and will probably turn more voters away than anything else. Witness the Republicans in 1996. It appears to me that the Democrats have learned from that lesson. You can tell by the 2000 campaign that the Republicans already have.
The Democrats of course need to do more than those three things I listed above, but those make for a darn good start.