Remember a few weeks ago when Howard Dean compared members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — to “cockroaches”? Adam Smith does.
No, not that Adam Smith, this Adam Smith.
Smith, a three-term Democratic congressman from Tacoma, Wash., and a Kerry supporter, has been following Dean’s presidential campaign closely and has concluded that the Vermont governor risks driving a “wedge” through the party.
In a column last week in Roll Call, an insider paper widely read on Capitol Hill, Smith offered what may be the hardest hitting critique of Dean’s tactics I’ve seen during the campaign season.
“Wedge politics has always been a double-edged sword,” Smith said. “On the one hand, employing the tactic can unite a large enough base of people for a given candidate or party to succeed politically, especially in the short term. On the other hand, the groups wedged out of the equation can become an equally united base of opposition to the politician or political party that chose to freeze them out, gathering sufficient strength to eventually counter the initial political success.”
Smith’s argument is that Dean’s style is to use a wedge to divide the party to his advantage, accusing his rivals of not just being incorrect about policy proposals, but labeling them traitors to the party for occasionally having compromised with Bush. Smith seems to think this may work to Dean’s advantage in the short term, but it will be to the party’s detriment over the next year.
“Dean has become increasingly vitriolic in his attacks on fellow Democrats in recent weeks, expanding upon a theme that has been central to his campaign for at least the past year,” Smith argued. “His attacks have always differed from the normal give and take between candidates vying for their party’s nomination in that he does not merely criticize his specific opponents for the prize. He vilifies any Democrat who supported the Iraq war resolution, any portion of the president’s tax cuts or the No Child Left Behind legislation, claiming these Democrats are worthy of nothing but the utmost contempt. He derides these people as ‘Bush lite,’ being no different from Republicans, having ‘rolled over’ and offered no resistance to the Bush agenda. He calls them cockroaches that will scurry away from the bright light he, our conquering hero, will shine upon them once he ascends to the White House.”
Smith added, “It makes no sense to insult and toss out of the Democratic Party a group of people, whatever their positions on these issues may have been, who currently oppose President Bush. It also smacks of arrogant demagoguery for Dean, a man who was hanging out in Vermont when a good many of these Democrats he likes to mock were fighting hard to stop former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution and to oppose the policies of George W. Bush, to stand up and claim that he is the only true Democrat running for president and the only person on the planet with the courage to take on President Bush.”
Smith’s column concluded, “Dean seems oblivious to the reality that he will eventually need the support of this particular group of ‘thems’ that he has chosen to drive a wedge into, and a person can be called a cockroach only so many times by a politician before that person decides that maybe it isn’t in his best interest to do anything at all to help that politician — ever.”
I guess Dean’s “cockroach” line hasn’t quite gone away yet.