Bush’s Worst Nightmare?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; 9:03 AM

Even Howard Dean’s detractors now believe he’s for real.

Real as in: Scoff all you want, this guy actually could be president.

The good doctor’s media treatment has gone through several distinct phases. First he was the colorful gadfly who had no chance of winning the nomination but was getting plenty of press. Then he was the serious threat who was suddenly raising truckloads of cash through some kind of Internet alchemy. Then he was magically declared the front-runner, but one who, critics said, would lead the Democrats to an ’04 defeat of McGovern or Mondale proportions.

Now even some conservatives are saying: watch out. And there’s a Web site called Republicans for Dean.

The new perspective may be driven in part by Bush’s declining popularity (45 percent, says Zogby) as Iraq turns from glorious victory to albatross. But it also reflects a realization that Howard III is hard to pigeonhole as an unabashed lefty.

Yes, he was against the war, wants to roll back the Bush tax cuts and approved gay civil unions in Vermont. But he also governed as a fiscal conservative, won business support and got high marks from the NRA.

I don’t know whether Dean is a nimble enough politician to broaden his appeal from angry underdog to potential commander-in-chief. You saw signs of that in the New Mexico debate, when he stressed that he supported the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan wars rather than harping on his opposition to the Iraq invasion.

As I noted Sunday in a Washington Post story, Dean’s advertising has been all issue-driven, as opposed to the biographical spots that Edwards and Gephardt are running. Dean rarely talks about his background, or his wife (who doesn’t do the campaign thing) or the death of his brother. But at some point he will have to give the public more of a peek into his persona, if only because modern campaigning seems to require that.

The other side is getting worried, reports USA Today:

"Republican Party officials and political advisers to President Bush admit that they underestimated Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean and say they now consider him a formidable potential adversary.

"Some Bush allies say he reminds them of another insurgent candidate who once bedeviled Bush: Arizona Sen. John McCain. His wins in Republican primary elections in New Hampshire and Michigan rattled Bush’s 2000 campaign. . . .

"No top Republican Party, White House or Bush campaign official wanted to be identified talking about Dean, but he’s as hot a topic inside the Bush camp as he is among his Democratic rivals.

"How worried is the Bush team? One campaign official notes that Dean is renting lots of cars in Iowa — evidence that Bush supporters in the state are keeping an eye on him and his campaign spending."

Counting the cars! Now that’s oppo.

Stephen Moore, who heads the conservative Club for Growth, recalls in the Weekly Standard how Dean showed up several years ago at Moore’s other employer, the Cato Institute:

"Dean charmed nearly everyone in the boardroom. He came across as erudite, policy savvy, and, believe it or not, a friend of free markets—at least by the standards of the Tom Daschle-Dick Gephardt axis of the Democratic party. Even when challenged on issues like environmentalism, where he favored a large centralized mass of intrusive regulations, Dean remained affable.

" ’You folks at Cato,’ he told us, ’should really like my views because I’m economically conservative and socially laissez-faire.’ Then he continued: ’Believe me, I’m no big-government liberal. I believe in balanced budgets, markets, and deregulation. Look at my record in Vermont.’ He was scathing in his indictment of the ’hyper-enthusiasm for taxes’ among Democrats in Washington.

"He left — and I will never forget the nearly hypnotic reaction. The charismatic doctor had made believers of several hardened cynics. Nearly everyone agreed that we had finally found a Democrat we could work with. . . .

"Not so fast. This is, after all, the former governor of the state that gave us Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch and the nation’s only self-proclaimed socialist congressman, Bernie Sanders. In Vermont, Euro-style tax-and-spend governmental activism is still in vogue and politicians like Senator Jim Jeffords pass as moderates. . . . Dean has boasted that he was ’the most fiscally conservative governor in Vermont in decades,’ but that’s like saying you were the most chaste woman in a Texas whorehouse. . . .

"I’ve been trying to think of what politician he most resembles. The former governor of a small state, he is charismatic, good looking, wonkish, craving of the spotlight, and capable of telling a room full of people precisely what they want to hear. The obvious answer recently hit me: Dean is Bill Clinton, but without the skirt-chasing.

"Republicans are said to be salivating over the prospect of a Bush-Dean match-up. They shouldn’t get carried away. . . . The trick for Dean is to ensure that the ultra-liberal positions he has taken in the primaries, which contradict his sometimes centrist record, don’t cripple his ability to reach out to Middle American voters in a general election—should he make it that far. If he does, and then finds a way to zig-zag back toward the center, Howard Dean could be George W. Bush’s worst nightmare."

Time’s Joe Klein sees the ex-gov as, shall we say, highly flexible:

"Dean turns out to be a flagrantly political anti-politician. As his campaign gains altitude, he seems to change a position a week. In the debate, he changed two — first on American troops in Iraq, then on American labor standards on trade. Before that, he trimmed his honorable position on raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and his support for lifting the embargo on Cuba. Dean still proudly struts his pro-gun stance in the anti-gun Democratic Party, but as often as not he points out the political efficacy of that position in the red states. The question is: How many of Dean’s positions are negotiable? As victory becomes a possibility, how much integrity will he compromise to win?

" Another question: How long before Dean’s tough talk — the apparent candor that propelled his charge — begins to seem arrogant, uninformed, unpresidential? ’I think Dean confuses being smart with knowing a lot,’ says a prominent Democrat who wants Dean to succeed. ’I’m not sure he knows a lot.’"

Dean and his advisers, says Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, "rightly think his best sales point is his image as an antipolitical politician, a country doctor turned governor. . . .

"His critics say that the good doctor can bend it like Beckham when he has to. They cite lots of examples. His position on Cuba is one. He had long supported rolling back the U.S. embargo on trade with Fidel Castro’s regime, but recently said that such a step — given recent human-rights violations there — would be a mistake at this time. Another reason for the change: next year’s pivotal primary in Florida. The Cuban-American voters there are Republicans, for the most part, but they are highly organized and always ready to demonstrate on TV.

"Some Dean moves — foes call them ’flip-flops’ — are from right to left. In 1995 he said he liked the idea of raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 to save money. Now he opposes the idea. As the governor of Vermont, he was a strong supporter of NAFTA, the free-trade agreement. Now that he is seeking labor support (and hoping to head off an AFL-CIO endorsement of Rep. Dick Gephardt), he harshly criticizes it. When he launched his campaign, Dean said he’d run within the federal campaign-finance system, which gives candidates cash if they agree to spending limits. At the time, Dean was worried about Sen. John Kerry’s ’opting out’ of the system and tapping the accounts of his wealthy wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now, flush with cash and a burgeoning contributor list, it’s Dean who may ’opt out.’ "

Of course, since Bush is opting out, that may make sense.

Dean was hitting the Iraq issue hard last night before nearly 4,000 people at the University of Maryland, reports The Washington Post:

"The crowd cheered Dean’s assault on President Bush’s tax cuts and what he called ’lies’ about the Iraq war.

’When I was your age, the government didn’t tell us the truth about Vietnam, either,’ Dean said, urging them to follow his generation’s footsteps."

Which brings us to how Bush’s big-bucks pitch on Iraq is playing. "Members of Congress said today that President Bush would get the $87 billion he requested for Iraq and Afghanistan, but that he would have to walk through a bit of fire first," says the New York Times. "Lawmakers said they expected sharp questioning of the request and a renewed debate about the effect on federal spending, taxes and the record-setting deficit.

"Many members predicted pressure will immediately build on non-defense programs, including the proposal to add a drug benefit to Medicare. Lawmakers noted that the amount requested in this single bill represented a fifth of all money to be spent next year on non-defense programs like education, housing and veterans affairs, many of which are already being squeezed by a deficit that will reach $480 billion."

Looks like the White House background briefers were out briefing, according to the Boston Globe:

"One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country’s infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country."

And the Wall Street Journal finds one fat target: "Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz faces a growing fury among Democrats and some conservatives at the optimistic projections he gave lawmakers just months ago. Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee and strong ally of Mr. Bush’s father in the Gulf War, said flatly, ’Wolfowitz is gone.’"

The prez has other money in mind as well, says the Los Angeles Times:

"A day after warning the nation that U.S. involvement in Iraq would be longer and costlier than anticipated, President Bush today turned his attention to his re-election campaign, collecting $1.2 million at a Tennessee fund-raising event.

"He also stopped by a public school in a low-income area of Nashville to underscore his credentials as an education reformer."

Slate’s Chris Suellentrop says the good press that John Edwards drew early on had little impact:

"All the adulation hasn’t done much for Edwards, however, other than demonstrating to him the powerlessness of the national political media. After sailing through the media primary and holding his own in the money primary, Edwards hasn’t made much traction in the ’primary primary’ — the one where voters cast ballots. At this admittedly still-early stage, it’s not clear why Edwards is considered in the Democratic field’s ’top tier,’ or why his candidacy is taken so much more seriously than, say, Bob Graham’s. . . .

"Edwards doesn’t appear to have momentum, he doesn’t have name ID, and after Dean raises the $10 million to $15 million he’s going to raise this quarter, Edwards won’t have a money advantage, either.

"Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t have a chance. In the two days I follow Edwards through northeastern Iowa, everything about his campaign proves to be just fine. The candidate is fine, the message is fine, the crowds are fine. The problem for Edwards is that fine doesn’t appear good enough to topple the growing Dean juggernaut. Edwards’ events aren’t soporific like Joe Lieberman’s, but they’re also not energizing like Dean’s. They’re perfectly pleasant affairs, not unlike a summer movie that fades from memory on the drive home."

Reaction to Bush’s Iraq address continues to pour in, starting with Andrew Sullivan:

"It was a good speech, well delivered. The only unnerving feeling I got was when the president said he didn’t want or need more U.S. troops. I remain unconvinced — but, hey, I’m open to persuasion. Max Boot says we need more civilians instead. Fine. Let’s have more civilians. But we need to be told exactly what the problem is and how we’re going to fix it. The president didn’t exactly do that. What he did do was lay out the broad objectives of the war on terror, explain better how Iraq is a central part of it, and with a request for $87 billion, showed that he means business. That was overdue and refreshing. Again, the speech would have seemed far less defensive if Bush hadn’t given the impression months ago that the war was over. If there’s been some public wobbling, I think it’s partly because of post-war hubris by the administration itself."

Josh Marshall is unimpressed:

"We went into Iraq to eliminate Saddam’s stock of weapons of mass destruction, to depose a reckless strongman at the heart of a vital region, and to overawe unfriendly regimes on the country’s borders. Agree or not, those were the prime stated reasons. Now we’ve got a deteriorating security situation and a palpably botched plan for reconstruction. And our effort to recover from our ill-conceived and poorly-executed policy is now the ’central front’ in the war on terror, which is among other things extremely convenient.

"The president has turned 9/11 into a sort of foreign policy perpetual motion machine in which the problems ginned up by policy failures become the rationale for intensifying those policies. The consequences of screw-ups become examples of the power of ’the terrorists’.

"We’re not on the offensive. We’re on the defensive. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo and flim-flam doesn’t change that."

The Note takes a whack at the fair & balanced network:

"Hey Fox . . . Thanks for hosting tonight’s second Democratic debate. We’re sure y’all are thrilled to be able to cite the Congressional Black Caucus’s sponsorship as proof that your news network is fair and balanced. No conservative network would team up with liberals to produce a debate, right?

"Yeah, though it’s a little too cute by half. Wouldn’t Roger Ailes be the first one to complain if MSNBC teamed up with the Congressional Black Caucus for a debate? Can you just imagine how much play that’d get on your network? Because doesn’t a debate sanctioned by an interest group lend implicit credibility to the views of that interest group? Not to mention that Fox is effectively giving the CBC the free production costs and national distribution for the event.

"Ailes would tell Steve Doocy to say that John Siegenthaler looks like his dentist. . . . Fox would interrupt programming with regular Fox News Alerts to showcase MS’s manifest liberalism. Fox’s dynamic primetime would consist of an hour of present-tense verbing from Shepard Smith (we remember you from WCPX in Orlando, Shep!) ’MSNBC . . . showing their biasing . . . according to some . . . teaming up with the Congressional Black Caucus to do a debate. . . . ’; Bill O’Reilly, ’I wish MSNBC would just shut up and admit how liberal it is. That’s ridiculous.’; Hannity: ’MSNBC is driving the nation down a moral sewer’; Colmes: ’I disagree.’; Greta Van Susteren: ’Up next, more on the Laci Peterson case. . . .’ But we digress. You get the idea."

So much for any Note appearances on O’Reilly.

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