Dean is No Carter
Political Wire’s Taegan Goddard says Howard Dean is more Carter than McGovern or Mondale:
Democrats wondering if they are on the verge of nominating another George McGovern; a candidate out-of-touch with the American mainstream. Naturally, supporters say the better comparison is Jimmy Carter, the small state governor who came out of nowhere to defeat an incumbent president.Recent emails from readers, and an excellent essay by Tom Gallagher, convince me the evidence plays more to the Carter comparison
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It’s still many months before Democrats settle on a nominee and President Bush’s $200 million war chest will be more than enough to define Dean (or any nominee) before most Americans tune into the presidential race. Nonetheless, most polls suggest the country is still split as it was in 2000. And with Iraq a mess and the economy sluggish, any decent Democrat has a chance to beat Bush.
Goddard’s clearly been spending too much time in the liberal media cocoon. Dean is no Carter. And besides, Carter barely managed to defeat the country’s first unelected appointed president by a razor-thin margin in the wake of the biggest scandal in US history. Carter is hardly an electoral giant for others to emulate.
Dean is McGovern + Mondale because he can easily be caricatured as a pro-tax anti-defense Democrat. Imagine the attack ads: “Howard Dean wants to raise the average American family’s taxes by over $1,000 a year! He wants to reduce the Child Tax Credit, reinstitute the Marriage Penalty and bring back the Death Tax!”
Despite what Goddard claims, Iraq is not “a mess.” The Iraqi governing council will set out a timetable for self-rule by December 15 and you can expect elections or, at the least, an Iraqi Constitution to be ready sometime next year.
And, despite what Goddard claims, the economy is not “sluggish.” Third-quarter GDP numbers will be released Thursday and will blow that theory out of the water. Expect GDP to grow by a stunning 6 percent or more, matching the performance of the economy at the height of the Clinton bubble. Similar, or slightly lower, rates of growth will prevail through 2004, creating millions, or at least hundreds of thousands, of jobs.
The Democratic presidential pack is a “sorry group,” as Barbara Bush put it. They’re so full of negativity and have been moved so far left by Dean’s ascendancy that they’ve provided more juicy sound bites than the Republicans could possibly use against them. Whoever emerges as the nominee, especially if it’s Dean, will likely be crushed by a GOP tidal wave in 2004.
Now, I admit that unforeseen circumstances may get in the way. Osama Bin Laden, who’s been reduced to making anonymous audio tapes from a cave, may yet figure out how to kill a few dozen Americans on US soil. Or the incompetent terrorists in Iraq may figure out how to kill three dozen Americans instead of three dozen Iraqis. Or there may be another Enron. Or some huge Bush-Cheney scandal concocted by the lying liberal media. But, barring such an unforeseen circumstance, the Democrats are headed towards becoming a permanent minority party in 2004.
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