2004 Elections: Democratic Party Contenders

I fully expect continuation of Dem successes on the order of those amassed over the past couple years, Bill, and welcome the notion you take such comfort from them as you seem to. If there's anything The Republicans need to fear, its that the Dems won't mount even the appearance of a credible challenge come next November. Walkovers are really unsatisfying, no matter how immediately gratifying they may be. Its not really much of a win if one's opponent forfeits.

Still, a win is a win. We'll take it.

Addressing the Dean Funding Endrun, Dean, I think, perceives reversing his previous commitment to accept, and abide by the restrictions of, public campaign financing as affording him the opportunity of crushing his rivals in the early primaries. Dean leaves the decision up to his supporters fully confident they will provide him the cover of "overwhelming opinion". Able to spend far in excess of the Federally allotted $1.5 Million in Iowa, and $750K in New Hampshire, Dean would critically disadvantage his opponents, just as Bush the Younger by such tactic disadvantaged the less fiscally gifted McCain last time around. Now, Sharpton may be expected easily to carry the essentially meaningless D.C. January caucus, which will give him some credibility going into Iowa and New Hampshire. There, a fifth-place or higher finish will give Sharpton's campaign even more leg, while the Kerry-Gephardt-Lieberman-Edwards gaggle can hope for little better than postponing meltdown and consequent earlier-than-had-been-hoped relegation to footnote status. Sharpton could well sieze on The Flag Flap to play The Race Card against Dean, further polarizing the party. The prospect of the Dem circus devolving into a perceived substantive contest between Dean and Sharpton is delicious.

timberlandko--that sounds like a friend of mine, who's a Yankee fan. After they were winning the recent World Series 2-1, he was smiling and asking us which Yankee we thought would get the MVP. Turns out, they lost the next three games.

Pride goeth before a fall, old son...

You are such a joke. Everyone who disagrees with you is stupid. Everyone who disagrees with you only watches Fox News. Everyone who disagrees with you was formula fed... Christ!

You think he's a centrist. I disagree and find the notion amusing. Live with it.

Okay, Scrat. Instead why not give some indication of what makes him left of center?

Hey, Scrat--As someone who sees the Republicans as slouching toward socialism (paraphrasing your signature), your idea of what makes for centrism (or liberalism or socialism for that matter) might be of interest to the rest of us. Please shed some light...

Dean's tactic is interesting to me. Make contact with the voter, do something different to raise money, get publicity for it, take the chance of being able to raise a lot of money if the band wagon gets going and everyone jumps on. It could work. They didn't ask me for my vote, Tartarin (guess I'm not yet a contributor) but if they had, I'd vote for the no-fed-money-and-no-spending-limit route.

I'm off now to check out the NYRB for the Elizabeth Drew article.

Oh and all y'all predictors of victory out there. I'm keeping records and copies of all these predictions and I WILL point out those who were wrong. Gotta have some fun election year. I don't know who will win yet. I am hoping, of course that it isn't GW. I think there's a good chance he could lose.........God I hope so. But still don't know. It's too early to tell. For one thing, we don't know what kind of scandals everyone will come up with along the way and how they'll play. I'll wait a bit before I start making predictions. But y'all go on, I'll be the historian for this group. It's a public service. :wink:

Okay... and these are my standards...

I'm consulting the DeanforAmerica website right now... (you'll note I'm not looking for info on him from some dirt_on_dean.com site the way so many here get their "facts" about Bush)...

o Dean is for using government money to prop up failing farm businesses. (government giveaways = left)

o Dean favors trampling states rights by having the federal government dictate state redistricting to the states

o Dean favors a number of voting and election changes which amount to little more than an attempt to rig the game so that Democrats can win

o Dean would repeal the Bush tax cuts.

o Dean is for government funded universal healthcare

o Dean would throw good money after bad propping up the failing social security and medicare systems, instead of overhauling and repairing them

o Dean is for a larger federal education bureaucracy, and seems to believe that children stand no chance of growing and developing well unless government takes responsibility for them practically from birth

Well, those are just a few items culled from his campaign site under "On The Issues".

Now, you may well consider some or all of these to be "centrist" positions. I do not. You may also think "well, he's on the left here and there but on the right here and there and that makes him a centrist". Well, if it does, then I'm a centrist too.

But I guess the more USEFUL thing for me to write is not to label him as "left" or "liberal", but to simply state that these are his stated goals which I identify with the left and with which I disagree.

And I suppose I should have kept all my laughing smileys in their box. If I'm going to sit here and say that I can consider him to be on the left for my personal reasons, then you certainly have the right to consider him a centrist for your own reasons.

Well, you made your point at about six or eight; the rest was overkill... :wink:

BTW, that was a well-reasoned post; Dean is hard to categorize for lots of people.

NRA supports him; so does PFLAAG.

I probably would not categorize him as 'liberal' (keeping in mind that anyone to the left of anyone else is going to get tagged with that epithet).

I'm pretty sure Dean's website didn't phrase his goals in quite the way you did, Scrat. Your phrasing was no doubt intentional, to make your point. I agree that he has a variety of positions which could run from mid-center (of the Democratic range) to the right. However, since there are also centrist Republicans who now favor a comprehensive,national healthcare plan and some of them EVEN concede that the government will have to do it, that issue has moved to the center in part because of its urgency.

There is at present a federal mandate for states to redistrict at regular intervals, I do believe.

No, I think your language, itself, gives you away. Would you like to go back to the website and state the positions in Dean's terms? Wouldn't that be more honest? Or shall we just agree to disagree?

Just one - all are questionable, but:



How does this compare to the fascist DeLay

Why didn't I think of that, Bill!!

Scrat -- as long as you stop doing the "centrist ha-ha" thing, it'll be just fine with me! Let us all admit a little complexity into our discussion of politics!

Scrat, I believe your tagline is more truthful as:

"The Democrats are crawling towards fascism while the Republicans are content to already be there." - me

My guess is that Scrat might favor unfettered capitalism. Perhaps more than we have now, with CEOs ripping off everything they can--including their shareholders--to feather their own nests.

What's the centrist view of that situation, Scrat?

Steal from the poor, give to the rich - oh, I'm sorry, they earned the money and deserve it How do you spend it in prison

There are rightwingers here who, limbotomized, put the center just about where DeLay stands (squats, grunting). That may cause the vision deficit when it comes to taking a realistic look at Howard Dean's campaign positions!

Now you want to dictate what language people use when discussing things with you? I doubt you will have anyone take up your offer.

You frequently add a hysterical rewrite to anyone you want to demonize so this is an unfair request.

Oh, no question, D'art. The Current Administration must maintain focus and fully prosecute every advantage. Its always possible a capricious providence might just hand The Dems an expoitable advantage, and that they might both recognize it and find some way to gain from it, however unlikely the concatenation of that series of potentialities might be. Thats what contingency planning is all about. To carry on with the baseball analogy, its not a Two Games-to-One Lead, its now well into Game Four, The Repubs have three straight wins already behind them, and are up 3 governors to none so far with a fourth (Jindal) at Third Base.

I didn't realize that the races you cite from Tuesday will count toward the 2004 presidential race. To keep the baseball analogy going, it would be like runs scored during the regular season counting in the World Series.

It doesn't work that way, timber...

Most analogies are stretches anyway D'art. So are Democrat perceptions of any success attributable to their current gameplan. While The Republicans are doing things about the issues, The Democrats put all their energy into complaining about The Republicans. Thats gonna sell to The Public about as well as Liberal Talk Radio has.

Complaining about Republicans IS the issue. This administration's extremism is such that defeating them is a more important goal than any previous partisan agenda.