Lies, foibles and misrepresentations of Howard Dean.

Would you? I think that would have been a pretty calculated rhetorical move - not a momentary loss of control. "Bring it on" - you and I may think it's stupid, but that kind of thing wins Bush votes from some people.

Heh.

Heh.

i don't know about you. but the more i hear other candidates critique dean, the less i like them.

there was a point where i would have probably campaigned for and openly supported whichever candidate gets nominated.

now the only ones i would extend that too is dean and edwards since i don't recall edwards ever openly attacking dean or anyone else for that matter.

On Dean-the-hothead ... I can't watch the debates from here - so I haven't seen tonight's, myself.

But from the reports I read and what the posters on the "Contenders" thread here said, I understand that the debate consisted primarily of all the other candidates pillorying [sp?] Dean with, sometimes quite aggressive, attacks, on pretty much everything.

Yet - from what I read - it seems that Dean did not lose his temper once, remaining in control and mostly at ease throughout the debate.

MSNBC writes:



I think that should count for something ...

More questionable statements from Dean?



http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/dean/articles/2004/01/02/dean_blames_bush_for_mutual_fund_scandal_1073092937/

Interesting.. According to the Seattle Time article here, Putnam Investmants had been playing teh market timing game since 1998. According to the here the charges against PBGH Growth Fund stem from actions taken beginning on March of 2000 and according to aReuter's Story here problems with Fred Alger Mgt started in the mid 1990s.

How is Bush to blame for things that happened prior to him taking office?

I think both Clinton and Bush have "fostered a "culture of permissiveness" when it comes to corporate wrongdoing" ...

... good thing he's standing up against that.

(And yeh, it woulda been more honest if Dean had blamed both of 'em ...

... but then you'd get all of Sofia's friends here again, talking 'bout how "Dean is attacking the Clintonites" and "burning all his bridges" ... )

Oooo! Don't let all those Bushie-bashers hear you talking like that.. No no no.. You're supposed to follow the party line. Everything is Bush's fault. All the laws that allowed everything those evil corporate pirates to do what they've done went into effect the minute he was sworn into office.

We-ell, way I see it is, if this kinda stuff has been going on for 4 or 6 or 8 years, then Bush is responsible for 3 of 'em ...

Dean burns Iowa bridge, and drowns in Own Words!

Funny no one else has brought the story that is burning up the papers.... Dean said the Iowa caucus is a big waste of time, and controlled by special interest groups---four years ago. Now, he: tried to deny it, and then said well, it was four years ago.

(Saw the tapes.)

All Clark has to do to get nomination: Keep mouth shut.

Dean in the danger zone

Six pitfalls that could plague
Dem front-runner's campaign

Howard Dean has a reputation for taking himself too seriously.

Howard Fineman
MSNBC contributor
Special to MSNBC.com

DES MOINES, Iowa - Joe Trippi was on my mobile phone. I had called him for some poll numbers and he sounded, understandably, hassled. Not frantic, but stressed. He should be.

As Howard Dean's campaign manager, Trippi has masterfully guided his man to the brink of the Democratic nomination. But Trippi has been around a long time, and he knows that in any campaign, especially a presidential nomination race, things can change faster than you can shout "Hart Upsets Mondale." If you're the front-runner at this point in a campaign, time seems to slow down to an agonizing crawl. Election Day can't come soon enough for you. Trippi knows that leads can crumble, an unexpected rival can rise up suddenly and that voters do what they want, not what pundits expect.

And under the pressure of approaching Armageddon, campaigns make mistakes. Dean's own errors as a candidate and public speaker are well-known, but generally have been rendered harmless by the tactical and strategic skill of his campaign. Until now. For the first time, I'm seeing the Dean Team off its stride, behaving like mere mortals.

The hardest thing to do in business is to close a sale, and it's the same with politics. Dean's numbers were holding steady in Iowa, Trippi insisted, but there was too much of what the pollsters call "volatility" to suit him. "The numbers are a mess," he said, meaning that things were still uncomfortably fluid. John Kerry was moving up fast, Dick Gephardt was sinking just as fast, and even John Edwards seemed to be making a late move. Front-runners don't like that much motion underneath, even if they are ahead.

So is there another Dean-like volcano about to erupt - a last-minute saga to supersede the Rise of Dean story line? Iowa will begin to give the answer. The snowy ground here is thick with volunteers. The phone lines are clogged with imploring phone calls. The radio and television airwaves are glutted with campaign advertising "spots."

Dean's own surge has clearly slowed. To revive it, this self-styled non-Washington politician is trying to goose his campaign in the most traditional way: with endorsements. Al Gore's seemed to help; Bill Bradley's clearly did not. Now the campaign is hoping that Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin will endorse, anointing Dean like a knight in a Shakespeare play.

What has the campaign done wrong? Here's my armchair general's list, for what it's worth:

Small logistical mistakes
No biggie, I guess, but if you are going to invite reporters to take part in a conference call, don't hook them into your own private staff meeting. That's what the Dean campaign did with reporters in Arizona, and it resulted in stories there quoting the Deanies' rather sophomoric strategizing. It's the kind of hurried, amateurish mistake they hadn't been making.

Are they really ready for prime time? In terms of stagecraft, they aren't there yet. Dean is self-conscious about his stature. He claims to be five-eight and three-quarters. I've spent a fair amount of time in his company and, while he is an energetic presence, he isn't a tall one. If he's nearly five-nine, I'm Larry Bird.

But Dean's problem isn't his height, it's his humorlessness. He isn't a guy to make fun of himself (the way his own dad did, calling himself "Short Me" as he strode energetically through life). In any case, his staff opened him to ridicule by the way they staged the endorsement from former NBA star Bradley. If Dean is going to stand on a soapbox, which, in effect is what he was doing, you don't allow the TV cameras to film the whole thing from behind. It was a silly, amateurish effort at stage-managing a fact that couldn't really be hidden in the first place. (~S--This was hilarious. He was standing on a box, and made Bradley step down off of it for the handshake photo op.)

Not settling internal tax debate
Late last summer I was told, pretty authoritatively - and reported in Newsweek - that Dean was about to come out with his own tax-cut plan, one that would make the former governor a champion of middle-class cuts and (the arithmetic requires it) of soak-the-rich philosophy. But it turned out that I was talking to only one part of the campaign, and not the right part. Dean never came out with a plan, on the theory that it was better to be simple and consistent - to stick with his more or less original view that all of the Bush tax cuts should be abolished, and that no new cuts should replace them.

Now there is talk that Dean will in fact propose a new tax plan, but it's too late. He will look like he's responding to others' plans, including Wes Clark's, geared to win the former general votes in anti-tax New Hampshire. Here's a rule of presidential politics: If you've been in the race for a year, you don't wait until two weeks before the voting starts to announce a fiscal plan for the country. Usually so nimble, the Deanies stumbled on this one. Then again, maybe they won't offer a new plan. But if that is the case, they and their allies shouldn't be talking as though it is a possibility now.

Hype out of hand
Trippi is a smart guy - very smart and very experienced. But at times he gets a bit carried away with the wondrousness of the Internet tsunami that Dean generated, and makes claims that are too large for his (and Dean's) own good. Now and then, Trippi forgets what I call Tully's Law: There are no straight-line extrapolations in politics; growth curves don't go on forever.

Last September, when Dean had 450,000 on his e-mail list, Trippi confidently predicted that he would have 900,000 by the end of the year. But the astronomical growth didn't continue, and the total has barely inched to 600,000. The campaign hoped that 5,000 volunteers would come here to Iowa for the last days. Some 3,500 have showed up - an impressive number but well short of the goal.

Talking up Kerry
Maybe I was being spun silly, and the Deanies are even more Machiavellian than I thought, but I got the distinct sense the other week that they were propping up John Kerry in Iowa - talking up his prospects there at least in part out of a hope that he would do two things for them: ace out Dick Gephardt for second place, thus eliminating Gephardt as a factor in later contests; and give Kerry a boost going into New Hampshire so that he would finish ahead of the guy they are really worried about - Clark.
If that was their game plan, and I think it was, there is at least a chance that they were too clever by half. Kerry has placed all of his bets on doing well here in Iowa - he has the bulk of his resources here now - and he has by all accounts moved into a strong second place position (or at least he had as of the middle of this week). Now the risk for Dean is that Kerry could do too well - and Kerry in close combat is formidable. (~~S-- Dean is accused of planing outsiders to vote ilegally in the caucus. I'll find the story.)

Endorsement fever
For a professed outsider and non-politician politician, the Dean campaign in these first Final Days seems too focused, almost obsessed, with endorsements from established figures. What brought Dean to this point was his feisty, anti-establishment flair. I understand why the Dean campaign wants to show that it can "unify the party." But it's premature to worry about it so much before the first votes are cast, especially if you are the kind of candidate Dean is supposed to be. Almost no one votes on that basis anyway, especially in knowledgeable and prideful places such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Blog is not the world
I get the sense sometimes that the Deanies live in their own world - I call it Dean World - and that if it is OK with the Blog, then they think they are fine. It's true that no single "gaffe" hurt Dean much, and, for the most part, their importance was dismissed by the chatterers on his various Web sites. But there is a larger universe out there, not just in the Democratic Party, but in the country, and it's clear that the small cuts have added up to some loss of blood. The campaign was born on the Blog, but it can't sustain itself there. Trippi knows that, which is why he is so nervous.

News
International
As governor, Dean was paid for speechesThe Associated Press
Updated: 4:44 p.m. ET Jan. 09, 2004WASHINGTON - While governor of Vermont, Howard Dean accepted personal pay from special interests at least five times for speeches and also received more than $60,000 in checks and pledges for his charity fund from insurers who benefited from a state tax break, according to documents and interviews.

Dean's fees and charitable donations were legal and did not have to be disclosed under Vermont law but were detailed in correspondence and tax records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The lion's share of Dean's $13,633 in personal speaking fees as governor came from a drug company that was embroiled in one of the nation's most high profile sexual harassment cases, which ultimately ended with a nearly $10 million federal penalty.

The checks and pledges totaling at least $62,500 to Dean's Vermont Computer Project, an initiative the governor created to donate equipment to Vermont schools, came from captive insurance and reinsurance companies, nontraditional insurers which provide health care coverage to companies in tax-friendly ways.

Suggestions of influence 'laughable'
Dean's campaign said Friday that any suggestion that the payments or donations influenced his actions as governor was "laughable."

"Anyone who knows Howard Dean knows he's a straight-shooter who calls them as he sees them and nothing, aside from his interest in the best public policy, ever influenced his decisions as governor," spokesman Jay Carson said.

But many of Dean's former gubernatorial colleagues, including his successor in Vermont, said they don't accept special interest speaking fees to avoid appearances or because of legal prohibitions.

"We choose not to accept anything of value," said Abby Ottenhoff, a spokeswoman for Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

The charitable checks and pledges were delivered to Dean and his aides in the mid-1990s by a lobbyist for the insurers. In one letter on his official stationary, Dean wrote lobbyist John L. Primmer to tell him about the status of a state tax break for the industry and to simultaneously thank him for a personal gift.

Here you go, Sofia, one more for your thread ... <shakes head>

On the other hand, another of Dean's supposed gaffes that was widely derided as showing he had lost all touch with reality, in fact turns out to be the middle-of-the-road majority opinion among Americans ...

Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. Jan. 8-9, 2004. N=1,001 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.

"In general, do you think Americans are safer and more secure now that Saddam Hussein has been captured?"

Yes, Safer 43%
No, Not Safer 53%
Don't Know 4%

But, in light of Dean's recent psychotic tirade on caucus night, I think 100% of Americans know America will be safer when somebody throws a net over Dean.

It won't be hard. He's only five feet tall.

<I have laughed my ass off at that man. He's been highly entertaining>

What comes next, Sofia, a comment about the size of his wife's tits?





Glad you are entertained.

The Moron in Chief effects me that same way -- although the creepy characters who pull his strings gimme the willies.

Turnabout.
It is said to be fair play.

Surely, you don't begrudge me a little fun at Dean's expense. It would take me two months of nonstop typing to rival the volumes poking at Bush.

<Is something wrong with his wife's tits?


Now, if you want to talk about her teeth...



(I am feeling silly about Dean, but blame that on the late night joke writers.)

I know, I know...and I truly understand.

The "short" comment hit home because I am not a giant myself -- 5'8" if I puff my chest out and stand very erect.

So I took the shot.

Glad you didn't bite my head off for it.

MY FIRST THOUGHT AFTER POSTING IT: Jeez, I wonder if Dean is married. I've never seen her if he is -- and if he is, the wife might be built like Dolly Parton.

5'8" is not joke fodder, and because I like you, you get an additional three inches. Because I don't like Dean, he lost about five...

Dean's wife is interesting. Absent and all, then shows for a one-time podium op, and then gone. There is a story there. I'd like to know more about her. (Really.)

Now, Sofie dear, if you were really interested (and not just playin' around), you wouldn't have to look very hard:

Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean

That crack about her appearance is beneath you. Caustic remarks about women's appearances are always out of bounds. Let's re-establish that that sort of thing is simply inappropriate.

Why don't you stick with the 'psychotic tirade' thing. It's not working, either, but at least you're swinging above the belt.

Here's another story about Judy Dean, if you're still interested.

And another, and one last onewhich I'll excerpt: