It seemed so unambiguous. I couldn’t find a hint of wiggle room.
Howard Dean sent an email to campaign supporters with a straight-forward message yesterday. It explained, “The entire race has come down to this: we must win Wisconsin.” The email went on to explain, “A win [in Wisconsin] will carry us to the big states of March 2 — and narrow the field to two candidates. Anything less will put us out of this race.” [emphasis added]
Political journalists read this and, understandably, thought this meant that Dean would withdraw from the race if he lost Wisconsin. After all, that what “put us out of this race” means.
But yesterday, as the do-or-die message was prompting Dean supporters to donate at a clip not seen since before the debacle in Iowa, the campaign started hedging on the exact meaning of the email.
As the New York Times reported, Roy Neel, the lobbyist-turned-Dean CEO, told reporters that they should not “read the words from Dr. Dean saying that he would be ‘out of the race’ if he lost Wisconsin to mean that he would be out of the race if he lost Wisconsin.”
“I don’t think that e-mail says that if he loses Wisconsin, he will get out of the race,” Neel said.
Great. The straight-talking candidate who excelled on his reputation of telling it like it is, now wants to debate the meaning of fairly obvious phrases such as, “Anything less will put us out of this race.”
The equivocation gets worse. When reporters asked Dean directly who was right — the email signed by Dean or his campaign manager’s remarks — the candidate simply described his email as “a brilliant ploy.” When asked to describe what he meant by that, Dean said, “It depends what your definition of the word ‘ploy’ is.”
Is this what the brilliant Dean campaign has been reduced to? Debating the word “ploy” and the meaning of “put us out of this race”? Oh, how the mighty have fallen.