The top tier of Democratic presidential candidates has shifted a bit over the last six months. Sometimes it’s included Edwards, other times Lieberman, usually Gephardt’s in there, and now Dean has solidified his position near the top. The only consistent member of the top-tier club has been Kerry.
Since Dean has charged ahead, every campaign — none of whom expected Dean to be competitive — has tried to spin the good doctor’s surge as a positive for their candidate. Edwards says Dean will take out Kerry and give voters a choice between someone electable and someone not. Lieberman says Dean can represent the far-left but that will clear the way for him to represent the middle. And so on.
The conventional wisdom is that Kerry is the one that Dean’s new-found popularity hurts the most. There may be some truth to this — if Dean beats Kerry in New Hampshire, things will get very tough for Kerry very quickly — but I’m beginning to wonder if Dean’s campaign may actually help Kerry.
I know this may sound crazy, but hear me out.
A year ago, when no one outside of Vermont knew Dean’s name, Kerry was already recognized as a likely candidate. The early knock on him was that his home state would be his downfall. Party leaders could hear the ads: “Massachusetts liberal” … Ted Kennedy-type … Michael Dukakis … New Englander.
Indeed, Kerry has a strong progressive record on issues important to Democrats. When I imagine the Democratic field withuot Dean, I see the pragmatists among the liberals slowly rallying behind Kerry, overlooking his vote in support of the Senate resolution on war in Iraq.
Of course, Dean is in the field, which has changed the dynamic dramatically. But one of the most striking elements Dean brings is his allegedly ultra-liberal agenda. This helps Kerry immeasurably.
I heard someone say recently that Kerry is a liberal running as a moderate, while Dean is a moderate running as a liberal. That may be a little over simplified, but there’s a lot of truth to this.
Many in the party are hesitant to back a liberal they assume would lose to Bush in the general election. Consider the Democratic Leadership Council, for example. The DLC, which helped produce Clinton and Gore, has fought to drag the Democrats to the middle. Some say they’re too centrist, but that’s another point for another day.
As has been well documented, the DLC is pulling its hair out over Dean. One of the main topics of conversation at the DLC’s national conference in DC over the last few days is how to defeat Dean before Dean destroys the party.
So how does this help Kerry? Because the more people see Dean as an unelectable liberal, the less pressure there is on Kerry. Without Dean in the race, many would immediately see Kerry as the most liberal of the serious candidates and therefore discount his electability. Dean’s aggressive outreach to the left deprives Kerry of some support, but it also positions Kerry as more centrist and more electable.
Kerry gets to say, in other words, that Dean is a McGovern-like loser who can’t win, while positioning himself as a get-tough Democrat, a war-hero, and the kind of leader who can unite the left and the center of the party. The liberal base can appreciate Kerry’s positions on social issues and taxes — where Kerry is on the same page as Dean — while the DLC crowd is satisfied that Kerry is strong on national security issues, where they perceive Dean as weak.
Harold Meyerson, the editor of the American Prospect, recently argued that Dems “need someone to unite a party doing battle with itself.” I think that’s certainly true. The question is who’s best positioned to do this? It’s definitely not Dean; he’s not only picking the intra-party wound, he’s causing the bleeding.
Meyerson argues, and I’m inclined to agree, it’s Kerry. Meyerson looked, for example, at the results of June’s MoveOn.org “primary.” Though Dean clearly came in first among the liberal voters, Kerry did very well when voters were asked which Democratic candidates they could enthusiastically support if those candidates won the nomination.
“MoveOn voters — a significant, if not necessarily representative, sample of liberal Democrats — seem to have established a hierarchy of pro-war candidates,” Meyerson wrote. “At the bottom is Lieberman, the most conservative candidate in the field; then Gephardt, the architect of the party’s support for Bush’s war; then Edwards, a not very critical supporter of that war; and finally, at the top, Kerry, who managed both to vote for the war and criticize it simultaneously. Some might call that incoherence, but of all the Democrats, Kerry is probably the best able to win support from all quadrants of the party. In message and manner, Kerry often still fails to connect with his listeners. But if he can put his own house in order, he’s the candidate best positioned to unite a party that’s not been this angry at itself since 1968.”