The 2004 electability issue revisited

[Kaleva]

Read a post in a thread over at GD-P which talked about how the media convinced Dems that Kerry was the more electable candidate. I remember that fierce debate well at the Howard Dean and Kerry forums back in 2004. Did some google searching and found a very fascinating article of which I'll post a section of with a link to the article below:

"Two weeks ago, Kerry beat Howard Dean by 12 percentage points in the New Hampshire primary, convincing Democrats around the country that Kerry was their most electable candidate. How did Kerry win? By racking up a 4-to-1 advantage over Dean among voters who chose their candidate because "he can defeat George W. Bush in November." Among voters who chose their candidate because "he agrees with you on the major issues," Dean and Kerry were tied."

http://www.slate.com/id/2095311/

Another excerpt from an article at Slate:

"Posted Sunday, May 4, 2003, at 2:43 AM ET"

"In tonight's debate, John Kerry continued to try to paint Dean as a wacko for conceding that the United States "won't always have the strongest military.""


"Joe Lieberman caused this debate to be delayed until sundown Saturday night. Now we know why. He was planning to smite his enemies and didn't want to do it on the Sabbath. Right out of the box, he leapt into the Dean-Kerry fray, ripping both men. He called their feud a "squabble," dismissed Dean as unelectable because of his anti-war position, and faulted Kerry for his "ambivalence" on the Iraq war."

http://www.slate.com/id/2082523/

Now, I don't recall if Kerry ever did call Dean a "wacko" or if Lieberman say that Howard was unelectable and I'd have to read the transcripts of the debate itself to see how the author of the article got that impression.

Richard Bennett ought to get and award of some kind for this post of his made on 7/3/03:

"I don’t blame the media for the confusion about Dean’s ideology, I blame the guy who said Dean represents the “democratic wing of the Democratic Party”, stealing a line from Paul Wellstone. Given that Wellstone was a radical left winger, and wasn’t at all ashamed to say so, the clear inference that we’re supposed to draw from this statement is that Dean is just as far to the left as Wellstone was. And the man who described Dean that way was, of course, Dean himself.

So he’s adopting trick from the John McCain playbook where he’s not only running to the left of Bush, he’s running to the left of himself. As we learned from McCain, that’s a tricky maneuver to pull off.

As a matter of record, Dean is a solidly centrist DLC Democrat. But his recent, post-gubernatorial rhetoric has departed from the strong national defense stance and the global engagement stance characteristic of DLC tradition and engaged in Buchananite isolationism and pacifism. It seems to me that he’s doing this to engage the Democratic Party base of disaffected, anti-globalization and anti-war young people, betting they don’t know enough about his voting record to see this as a cynical gesture. Presumably, he plans to tack back to the center after winning the nomination. But the convention is a year away, and we know from the McCain example that candidates who depart from their true colors in the interest of being “flavor-of-the-week” often become so confused they can’t remember what they really believe, and the voters can see this.

Dean has another problem, one that McCain never had: he doesn’t cultivate the media. McCain was made to look like more of a contender than he was by a press corps giddy with access. Dean has not only failed to cultivate the press, he’s alienated them with his impersonal, imperious, doctor’s personality.

He’s got a lot of work to do before he can win the nomination, let alone the election.

Posted by: Richard Bennett at July 3, 2003 09:12 PM"

http://www.watchblog.com/democrats/archives/000190.html