this interesting item<\/a> in today’s New York Daily News:<\/p>\nWhite House political strategists believe Howard Dean has a hammerlock on the 2004 Democratic nomination — and they’re trying hard not to gloat about it.<\/p>\n
Senior Bush political managers have been ordered to curb their cockiness but many of them privately say President Bush has drawn the opponent of his dreams in Dean — a left-leaning Democrat they contend can be tarred as a latter-day George McGovern. <\/p>\n
“The best thing Bush has going for him is that Dean is a weak Michael Dukakis,” a key Bush official told the Daily News. “Dukakis won 10 states. Unless things turn very bad for Bush, I don’t see Dean winning more than five.”<\/p>\n
The source concedes New York and California to Dean, and presumably his home state of Vermont, but does not spell out where else the Democrat could win. <\/p>\n
A second prominent campaign adviser echoed: “We are extraordinarily happy today.” <\/i>
\n
\nAt the end of the piece, a Bush aide said, “We can’t say this publicly, but we love that Dean’s coming on. Never in a million years did we think there was a chance we’d get Dean.”<\/p>\n
I’ve frequently heard Dean fans say that GOP talk of welcoming a match-up against Dean is really just a secret ploy at reverse psychology. Republicans, the theory goes, really fear<\/i> Dean in the general election, but they say the opposite to throw Dems off.<\/p>\n
I’m certainly not inclined, in general, to trust Republican spin, but I think it’s safe to say in this instance that they really do<\/i> believe that Dean would be a weak general election candidate. Dems can debate the merits of these beliefs, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t just a stealth scheme motivated by genuine fear of Dean’s general election prospects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve heard that people should be careful what they wish for, but it’s disconcerting to see just how happy Republicans are about Howard Dean’s prospects in the Dem primaries. National Review has Dean on the cover this week with the all-caps headline, “Please nominate this man.” The photo shows Dean in a frothing-at-the-mouth kind of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}