Well, it was fun while it lasted. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait began his "Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe" last December, never suspecting he would write a mere six weeks later, "Farewell: my work here is done. I've loved writing the Diary of a Dean-o-phobe, but it's no longer necessary."
In the process of lowering Dr. Howard into his political grave, Chait has some positive words for Gen. Clark:
I'd love to see the Democrats nominate Wes Clark, who still has great potential as a general election candidate, or John Edwards, who has great potential not only as a candidate but as a president also. (For months I've been saying Edwards would make the best president and Clark, due to his unbeatable resumé, the best nominee. I'm now thinking Edwards's skills may nearly make up for his less-formidable resumé.)As for this week's frontrunner, Chait is less than enthusiastic:
John Kerry takes all the fun out of Dean-o-phobia. Indeed, if there's anybody who could make Dean attractive, it's Kerry. Kerry is a miserable candidate, bereft of political skills, and possessing of a record and a persona tailor-made for Karl Rove. The Republicans will merely have to say about Kerry what they said about Gore--that he wants to be on every side of every issue, that he's culturally out of touch with mainstream America, that he's a pompous bore--and this time the sale will be easier, because all these things are far more true of Kerry than of Gore.
Speaking for the Republican wing of the Republican party, Tacitus isn't much happier with George Bush's track record than say, Howard Dean. The more or less 50% of Americans ready to dump the president may be swelled by Republicans who don't recognize their party in the politics of the administration:
The White House has gotten things badly wrong this time, as both party and people start to peel away. Conservatives are starting to revolt over ludicrous spending levels, and there are a lot of Americans who will not feel that they're better off in November '04 than they were in November '00.And while "electability" has become a fetish for Democrats, as if voters in Iowa and NH really have a clue as to what will swing Ohio, this conservative is painfully reflecting upon whether or not the Republican party remains the natural home for his values:
Now we must ask ourselves what's best for the party in November '04. It's not necessarily electoral success. If the President wins reelection this fall, then the elements of the party that feel free to ignore core conservative principles have won. Victory is, after all, the ultimate validation. And defeat is the ultimate rebuke: is that the level of rebuke we need to get the party leadership back on the principled path?. . . There is a separability between the conservative cause and the Republican party, but let's be honest and admit that one without the other is essentially impotent. Our current course means that split is, I think, coming sooner or later, to the detriment of both.However the great national divide evolves, Tacitus is prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve his principles, if not his politics:
In recent memory, the Congressional Republicans have shown themselves capable of holding the line and driving meaningful change for the country while not lulled by the illusion of a like-minded Executive; and Democratic presidents have shown themselves amenable to reasonable compromise on a conservative policy agenda. Personally, at the moment, if the Dems nominate a candidate who looks like he might be that sort of president, I'd give the arrangement some serious thought. Yes indeed. May God have mercy on my soul.Amen
Without yet declaring himself for one of Dean's rivals, The New Republic's Jonathan Chait is carefully de-constructing arguments in favor of the doctor on his blog, Diary of a Dean-o-phobe. Countering highly regarded Democratic Leadership Council advisor Elaine Kamarck's endorsement of Dr. Dean, Chait disagrees that Clark's electability is based soley on his biography, since he has no "record."
Chait suggests:
Even if Republicans could somehow transform Clark into, I don't know, some kind of socially liberal draft-dodging Vermonter, would he really have no domestic policy to fall back on? The assumption here is that on domestic policy, biography is everything. But there's something else he'd have, namely a platform. The second part of the Clark strategy is that, by negating GOP advantages on toughness and culture, Clark could press the advantage the party has on domestic priorities. Voters overwhelmingly prefer his plans to take back tax cuts for the rich and instead expand health care, reduce the deficit, and so on. Sure, he couldn't point to a state record. But how important is that? Bill Clinton in 1992 ran on his platform, not his record--which, in fact, Republicans turned into a liability, harping constantly on how tiny and backward Arkansas was. Sure, having a domestic record is a marginal advantage, but candidates invariably spend more time on their promises for the future than their past accomplishments. Fitness to serve as commander-in-chief, on the other hand, is more of a gut equation based on persona.This speaks, of course, to the $64,000 question: at the end of the day, will voters feel more threatened by Bush's reckless abandonment of the level playing field as regards the economy and health care, or his failure to address the root causes of our national insecurity. If the later is the case, then "Are you more secure than you were four years ago?" resonates more than "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" If the debate is framed along those lines, as I fervently hope it will be, Clark is clearly the most prepared candidate to hit the ground running: even with a hostile Congress, with whom he has had no direct experience, Clark should be able to rapidly re-configure State, Defense, the CIA, and Homeland Security in such a way as to dramatically increase our effectiveness against terrorism. Whatever Dr. Dean's innate abilities, he'll have a very steep learning curve on national security. I'd prefer Gen. Clark's relative inexperience in domestic affairs, given a choice.
Today's New York Times plugs the respected Columbia School of Journalism's new website, campaigndesk.org. "Staffed by responsible journalists whose job is to monitor, critique and praise the campaign press on a daily basis," the new site's staff includes Bryan Keefer, 25, a co-founder of a similar site, Spinsanity .com; Zachary Roth, 28, a former intern at The Washington Monthly; and Thomas Lang, 22, a former intern at The American Prospect. These, we note, are alumni of left-leaning, Democrat favoring publications, although Spinsanity delights in de-bunking BS from both ends of the political spectrum.
While a number of links had yet to go live as of this afternoon, Campaign Desk promises to parse media coverage from a number of pov's: "postings" are categorized by "medium," "angle," "issue," and "candidate." An on-topic sample is Thomas Lang's rebuttal of Slate's Chris Suellentrop's odd round-up of Clark quotes meant to expose his eccentricity and verbal impulsiveness. (Suellentrop has since claimed his piece was satirical and is dismayed it wasn't taken as such).
After submitting each of Clark's quotes to careful analysis and finding them reasonable in and of themselves, Lang concludes:
The danger is that Suellentrop's illusions, masquerading as headlines, could be picked up by other media outlets and echoed across the web. In fact, that process has already begun. NewsMax.com, a conservative political news outlet, posted a feature article with the headline, "Clark: Bush 'Never Intended' to Get Bin Laden." That article was nothing more than a carbon copy of Suellentrop's piece with a dollop of added bias.Josh Marshall has a similar deconstruction of Suellentrop's day trip to David BrooksWorld at Talking Points Memo.
Note to Campaign Desk: your Movable Type design is attractive and well laid out, but do add permalinks to the postings (the link above only points to the "Angle/Distortion" sub-category, not the article itself). Also, the "small text" or "large text" option isn't working, and trust me, eyes older than 22 need it. If I didn't know better, I'd assume that the tiny default font size was chosen for the same reason I can't read the ingredients on a can of Friskies cat food.
PS: Suellentrop's name is spelled correctly in the first instance. Eight subsequent references are spelled "Sullentrop." No pun intended, I'm sure.
Posting in "Best of the Blogs," Josh Hammond finds Wesley Clark ably fitted for the presidency in a manner both unique and timely:
. . . What do we know about the kind of president Clark would make? I don't know the man and haven't worked for him, but there are two key elements in his style that I have studied over the years and they signal that Clark would be a very different kind of president from both Dean and the current temporary resident of the White House. One, Clark talks about leadership, not the presidency or being commander-in-chief. Two, Clark, by discipline, training and experience is a trainer and a leader--30 years worth.One of Hammond's more interesting insights is that, far from being managed "top-down" or from a pre-determined set of assumptions, modern military management is, in theory, if not always in practice, a model of open-mindedness and broad participation among experts trained to consider a problem in the context of a variety of disciplines.. . . Clark, a Rhodes Scholar like Clinton, is schooled in the theory and practice of scenario planning and scenario training. While this highly sophisticated management technique was first developed by Shell Oil Company in the 80s, the U.S. Army has developed it into a science. All Army officers are required to go through the training and then train others in return. All untested Army programs and all new Army situations need to go through scenario planning and testing BEFORE they are used or implemented.
In the U.S. Army scenario planning is a form of participative management (democracy) that openly assesses the effectiveness of new programs or strategies before they are implemented or adopted. The process involves a comprehensive assessment of what worked in the dry run and what didn't work and why. And this is the key dimension: the analysis is on multiple fronts to determine if the failure was a function of leadership, training, communications, technology, or other factors. Once identified, corrective action can be taken collectively.Hammond even gives Clark political props based on his non-political background:
With Clark making a move now in the primaries, I sense he has taken his troops through this process to assess why he fell back in the pack after a good start. What we are now seeing is Clark benefiting from his own scenario analysis. Look out, Dr. Dean.Imagine a president who is able to evaluate intelligence independently, based on an understanding of how the data came to arrive on his desk. While Howard Dean's medical training may give him a highly useful grounding in scientific method, it cannot substitute for Clark's intimate understanding of geo-politics and the precise strengths and limitations of US military power. And the rational flexibility both Democrats can bring to problem-solving is certainly an improvement on the faith-based methods now in place.