http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040223&s=foer022304 With John Kerry cruising to victory, these are supposed to be healing days for Democrats, when they embrace old adversaries and apologize for vicious attacks launched during the primaries. But now that Howard Dean has fallen, some in Washington can't resist kicking the corpse one last time.
Last week, I called Ivo Daalder, an alumnus of Bill Clinton's national security team, at his Brookings Institution office. And, while etiquette might dictate that Daalder lavish praise on the vanquished candidate, he spent our phone conversation critiquing Dean's foreign policy. In Daalder's view, the Vermont governor's positions on Iraq range from the facile--"bringing into one hundred thousand Muslim troops that don't exist"--to the self-destructive--"I didn't like that he criticized the senators who voted for the eighty-seven billion dollars. We can't get things right in Iraq without the funding."...What makes this rebuke of Dean's foreign policy particularly odd is that Daalder was himself a primary architect of that policy. It was Daalder who helped draft the speech Dean delivered at the Pacific Council for International Policy last December, outlining his approach to national security. In foreign policy interviews Dean gave to The Washington Post and The New York Times a day before that speech, Daalder sat by the governor's side. Similarly, it was Daalder who presided over a question-and-answer session at the National Press Club, when the Dean campaign unveiled its foreign policy team. According to one of his Brookings colleagues, who watched a procession of high-powered Democrats traipse to Daalder's office to pay respect to Dean, "Ivo was The Guy."
In the wake of Dean's unraveling, however, Daalder is promoting a revisionist history of the campaign, where his status is downgraded to something significantly less than The Guy. "My position is that I'm happy to advise anyone." He pauses before adding, "I don't have a central role, and I never did."
Why is Daalder backpedaling so furiously? Because he understands that he could suffer payback for his Deaniac days. Dean, after all, famously took aim at Washington politicians, at one point referring to them as "cockroaches." And the feeling was largely mutual. Many in the Democratic Party establishment felt the Dean campaign represented the unmaking of Clinton's political legacy--a return to the days when the party failed to package its policies for mainstream consumption. Despite this, when Dean established himself as the front-runner, some Washington Democrats followed Al Gore's lead and jumped on people-powered Dean's bandwagon anyway. Thirty-five congressional Democrats endorsed him before Iowa--more than endorsed any other candidate--caucusing regularly at California Representative Zoe Lofgren's house......"
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