On Friday, I mentioned that The New Republic was profiling two articles about Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, one which concluded Dean would lose to Bush miserably, the other which said the opposite.
I’ve gone over Jonathan’s Chait’s piece on the anti-Dean approach, so today I wanted to mention Jonathan Cohn’s opposite conclusion.
Cohn and Chait disagree on much when it comes to Dean, but appear to accept an underlying truth: Bush is vulnerable but defeating him will be a serious challenge. It would be foolish, both appear to agree, for Dems to nominate an unelectable liberal with limited national appeal.
Cohn concludes, however, that Dean is not the man people perceive him to be. Dean is a moderate.
Never mind all this talk we keep hearing about Dean being left of left, Cohn says. Dean has a record as a “moderate, fiscally disciplined governor” on issues ranging from balanced budgets to education to health care.
Dean, Cohn concludes, “is no left-wing radical,” and those who paint him as a liberal are “misrepresenting his positions.”
I would disagree, however. Dean’s critics aren’t making Dean out to be an unapologetic liberal, Dean’s campaign is.
To be sure, Dean was a moderate Dem as Vermont’s governor. As Cohn points out, he frequently butted heads with Vermont’s most liberal voters and constituency groups, so much so that the state now has an active Progressive Party that began to grow when they saw Dean bringing the Dems too close to the middle. (The existence of the Progressives in Vermont mirrors the problem the national Dems have with the Green Party. Thanks to the Progressives effectively splitting the center-left, anti-Republican vote, Vermont now has a Republican governor, lieutenant governor, and plurality in the State House.)
When Dean’s presidential campaign was in its infancy, Dean emphasized this moderate record as a sign of his electability. His initial campaign manager, Rick Ridder, who worked for Gary Hart in 1998 and Clinton/Gore in ’92 and ’96, signed on with the expectation that Dean was a centrist.
Now Ridder is back in Denver, and Dean’s staff has been fully overhauled. With the new staff came a fresh message that is decidedly more liberal than before.
Cohn points repeatedly to Dean’s moderation, and he’s not wrong. But the point isn’t whether Dean is a centrist, it’s whether he’s campaigning as one.
When Dean started running, he was dismissed by the political establishment and the media as a longshot because of his low name recognition, not because he was perceived as too liberal. Now that’s switched. Name recognition isn’t much of a problem anymore, but the idea that he’s too liberal to win is.
Cohn argues this is a mischaracterization, and it may very well be, but Dean has only himself to blame. It’s his campaign that wants Dem primary voters — most of whom are liberal — to believe that Dean is one of them. Dean, for example, frequently tells audiences of liberal activists that they can not only help him “take back the country,” but also that they can “take back the Democratic Party.” Who do you think he’s talking about? Can anyone reasonably assume that he’s telling these folks that he wants to “take back” the party from liberals and return it to moderates? Of course not.
Dean is convinced, I believe, that he can follow the old Nixon adage that you run to the margins during the primary and then run to the center during the general election. If I’m right, this is a recipe for disaster.
The perception of Dean = Liberal is already largely solidified in the minds of political reporters and it will quickly become the prism through which all Dean news is filtered. As Cohn quoted the DLC’s Bruce Reed as saying, “Dean’s about to discover the lesson that has doomed so many Democrats in the past: Once you’ve abandoned the center, it’s hard to get back there.”
This stigma, reinforced by ubiquitous GOP ads citing the more damaging Dean quotes offered during the last few months, limits his appeal to independents and moderate Republicans that the Dem nominee will need if he or she has any hopes of winning next year.
Cohn does an effective job of arguing that Dean has other important traits that make him an effective candidate, in addition to his moderate record that no one (including Dean) is talking about, including his campaign’s impressive organizing skills, fundraising prowess, Dean’s ability to “talk like a human being,” and his moderation on the gun issue, which tends to bury Dems in the South.
All of these are points I agree with, but they don’t negate Dean’s flawed strategy of running left now in the hopes that he’ll figure out a way to be a moderate again by the time the general election rolls around. If you thought the national media filleted Gore for trying to “reinvent” himself, imagine what the reporters will say when Dean tries to say, “Never mind all that liberal stuff I said in the primaries. I really am a moderate.”