First Door on the Left

Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean will begin running a combative anti-Bush television commercial Monday–in Texas only.

In the ad, which Dean taped last Wednesday in Council Bluffs, Iowa, he wears a blue, open-necked work shirt, faces the camera, and says, “I want to change George Bush’s reckless foreign policy, stand up for affordable healthcare, and create new jobs… Has anybody really stood up against George Bush and his policies? Don’t you think it’s time somebody did?”

The media buy cost between $100,000 and $200,000, U.S. News has learned. It will run in Austin, 87 miles away from where Bush is vacationing in Crawford.

Among the other exclusive details to be reported in Monday’s edition:

–Dean’s road map for victory is to come in first or second in Iowa, first in New Hampshire, attract the supporters of the Democratic challengers and roll to victory.

–Although most media reports have focused on Dean’s money, his number of volunteers is even more important. He currently has 226,775 volunteers. He wants 450,000 by Sept. 30 and 1 million by Dec. 31. If he gets the million, Joe Trippi, his campaign manager says, “I don’t know what specific states we will win, but it will be very hard to stop us.” (By the end of the Democratic primaries, Dean wants 2 million volunteers, and 3 million by Election Day.)

–Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe secretly went to all the campaigns a few weeks ago and said that when it was “mathematically clear” that the party had a nominee (a date he estimated would be no later than March 9) he wanted the losers to drop out, release their delegates and endorse the presumptive winner. Dean refused. He is going to the convention with his delegates pledged to him no matter what.

–Dean wore a bulletproof vest during the debate on civil unions in Vermont.

–The only person Dean consulted before running for president was Hillary Clinton, to make sure she wasn’t going to run.

I find the bit about the bulletproof vest kind of hard to believe.

I don’t believe Mr. McAuliffe needs to be to concerned about Governor Dean releasing his delegates because I don’t believe there will be any need. At this point in time I do not believe there can any longer be any doubt that Howard Dean will be Democratic nominee for president in 2004.

This is too funny for words…

WASHINGTON (AP) — James A. Traficant, a former Ohio congressman in prison for bribery and racketeering charges, has given his approval to supporters to form a presidential exploratory committee.

“The battle to free James Traficant and to evict the Socialists and ‘free traders’ from the Democratic Party is now under way,” campaign spokesman Marcus Belk said. “Someone buy the Washington establishment a bottle of Maalox.”

Belk said the group, which announced Friday that it had gotten Traficant’s approval by letter, has raised $10,224 in cash pledges made on Traficant’s campaign Web site. The average contribution was $71, he said.

Once a campaign committee raises or spends more than $5,000, it is required to file a statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission. Belk said the campaign had mailed that form to the FEC Friday; it had not yet been received by the commission. Traficant’s group filed a signed “Statement of Candidacy” form with the FEC last week.

Belk said the campaign hopes to meet its goal of raising $100,000 to qualify for federal matching funds by October 1, which is when he expects Traficant to formally announce his presidential candidacy.

Traficant, a Democrat who represented northeast Ohio in the House for nine terms, was expelled from Congress in July 2002 after being convicted in a federal court of racketeering, bribery and tax evasion. He is now serving an eight-year prison sentence at the minimum-security Allenwood federal prison in White Deer, Pennsylvania.

The former lawmaker couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Well of course he couldn’t be reached for comment… he’s in prison!

Despite vigorous efforts by Sen. John Kerry’s campaign to pin the can’t win label on Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont has as good a chance - maybe even better - to be accepting the Democrats’ nomination for president a year from now in Boston.

Kerry is losing his home field advantage, despite being next door to New Hampshire with its first-in-the-nation primary and an army of organizers to send there. Dean’s state also abuts New Hampshire. He is energizing its Democrats with his blunt talk, anti-war consistency and a dedicated, Internet-driven network of volunteers.

And though the convention will be held within earshot of Kerry’s Louisburg Square townhouse, he could end up having to hoist Dean’s hand as the nominee.

The Vermonter has pushed past Kerry on some key measures of support, according to the latest Boston Herald poll of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.

Dean led Kerry by 28 percent to 25 percent, a statistical tie given a 5 percent margin of error, with seven other candidates left in the dust. And Dean, a physician, ranked ahead of Kerry on health care, a key issue.

But what must alarm the Kerry camp most are the numbers on what might happen if Sen. Hillary Clinton were in the race, according to Tuesday’s Herald. She’s not likely to run in ‘04. She’s still perceived as too divisive nationally. Maybe ‘08. But the story is what the poll shows in the difference in core support in New Hampshire for Dean and Kerry.

Clinton - her popularity pumped by her current rock star-style book tour - would lead in New Hampshire. But not by much over Dean. The former first lady had 27 percent in the poll, Dean 23 percent - a gap within the margin of error. Yet she’d lead by double digits over Kerry, whose support would fall from 25 percent to 16 percent.

That indicates Dean’s supporters are passionate, committed, ready to stand by their man no matter what. But that many of Kerry’s are fickle, ready to shift to whichever candidate seems hottest at the moment.

Sure, Kerry can crow about the 47 percent that declared him more electable, while only 17 percent said the same of Dean. And the senator, a decorated Vietnam veteran, got higher marks on foreign policy.

Yet while 47 percent said Dean would bring fresh ideas to the White House, only 17 percent said Kerry would. That’s from an electorate that has been exposed to Kerry, through Boston media, for years.

Ah, the outside-the-Beltway, fresh-face phenomenon. It worked for Jimmy Carter back in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and for awhile for John McCain in 2000. So far, it’s working for Howard Dean.

Dean, who pulled in $7.6 million to top all candidates in 2003’s second quarter, is raising enough money to duel Kerry, tarmac-to-tarmac, in what will be an ads and quick-interview campaign after New Hampshire.

Other Democrats are in trouble. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut is having a hard time raising funds. Sens. John Edwards of North Carolina and Bob Graham of Florida are mired at 1 percent in the New Hampshire poll. And U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri has missed nearly 90 percent of this year’s House votes while out campaigning. (Sort of makes Kerry look like a piker with an absentee rate of about 40 percent.)

If Gephardt is going to be that derelict, he ought to do the right thing and resign from Congress to campaign full time. His state, indeed the nation, deserves better. Especially after House Republicans scored a 217-216, one-vote weakening of Head Start last Thursday. Only two members missed the vote, a Republican whose father had just suffered a stroke, and Gephardt, who was campaigning in South Carolina.

So Dean is emerging as Kerry’s toughest foe. GOP pollster Bill McInturff predicts that the new voters Dean is attracting will expand the New Hampshire primary electorate from the usual 150,000 or 175,000 to 200,000 and, probably, deliver Dean a significant victory.

Dean then either would emerge as the nominee or define the Democratic Party, forcing rivals leftward in order to beat him. Either way, McInturff projects Bush wins.

Yet Dean is a governor who understands how the Bush tax cuts have left many states in the lurch. He is a doctor with solid credentials on health care. And he has shown he can pull money literally out of cyberspace.

Beatable? Sure, who isn’t? A pushover? No sane Democrat says that anymore.

“Either way, McInturff projects Bush wins.”

Isn’t it amazing how little credit these pollsters give the people of the United States? They must think we’re all a bunch of brainless zombies. There is no way we are going to give Bush & Co. another four years to destroy our country.

(McInturff? Sounds like a steak and lobster sandwich you would get at McDonald’s.)

WASHINGTON - Although U.S. teams in Iraq have failed so far to find weapons of mass destruction, the official leading the search struck an upbeat note Thursday, all but promising to turn up evidence of forbidden Iraqi weapons programs.

“We are, as we speak, involved in sensitive exploitation of sites that we are being led to by Iraqis,” said David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector named by the CIA as an Iraq-based special adviser directing the search. “There is solid evidence being produced.”

But echoing a recent shift by White House and other administration officials, Kay repeatedly referred to the possibility of finding evidence of illegal weapons “programs,” as opposed to finding the weapons themselves.

Meaning, of course, “We’ve almost got the evidence planted. Expect an announcement any day now. We’re just waiting for Mr. Rove to tell us when.”

It seems that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have finally gotten around to activating their campaign website.

Check it out. (click on the banner below)

GWBush04.com

MONTREAL (CP) - Few Canadians likely know his name, but former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s uphill U.S. presidential campaign has roots in Canada.

For years, the would-be Democratic presidential candidate made the hour-long drive north to hone his media skills as a television political commentator. “Gov. Dean owes a great deal - not necessarily to the exposure he received in Canada - but to the experience of having to be a regular talking head on Canadian television,” said Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont.

The Editors, a show about U.S. and Canadian politics, is filmed in an old mansion at McGill University and is broadcast on PBS and CBC. Dean’s participation reinforced his standing as an articulate, knowledgeable governor of a small state on the Canadian border, said Nelson.

In the many years he appeared on the show, Dean displayed an impressive interest in and knowledge about Canada, said David Johnston, the show’s host before he left McGill to become president of Ontario’s University of Waterloo.

“I was quite struck by how deeply informed and deeply interested he was in Canadian matters generally and Canadian medicine in particular,” the former McGill principal said in an interview.

Attending regional conferences of New England governors and Canadian premiers during his 11-year governorship provided Dean, 54, with his initial executive level international experience.

Former Canadian foreign affairs minister Barbara McDougall, who frequently appeared on the show alongside Dean, said the former physician understood the significance of a very positive bilateral relationship with Canada.

“Yes, he would be good but that doesn’t mean he would be better than the others,” she said of the other candidates vying for the party’s nomination next July, ahead of the November 2004 presidential election.

“I think it’s important that they know the significance of the relationship. It’s helpful.”

Familiarity with Canada also runs in the Dean family. His wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg, completed a fellowship in hematology at the Royal Victoria Hospital before joining Dean’s medical practice in 1985.

The couple and their two children also took several cross-Canada vacations.

Steinberg rarely speaks about public issues and declined to be interviewed.

It’s unclear whether her exposure to Canada’s universal health-care system has influenced Dean. The five-term governor advocates near-universal access to health-care coverage but not a government-run system like Canada’s.

Steinberg would move her medical practice to Washington if her husband became president. That has prompted comparisons to the fictional presidential spouse on The West Wing, who is also a physician.

Like the popular show’s president, Dean hopes to capture the Democratic nomination as an underdog former New England governor. The pugnacious former governor has risen dramatically in polls and raked in millions of dollars in donations.

Vermont is known more as the granola state comprised of liberals and organic farmers than as a political bellwether.

Many conservatives view Vermont as “some weird social laboratory, if not some place that we should have let Canada have long ago,” Gregory Sanford, a Vermont archivist and historian, was quoted as saying in a recent Washington Post article.

As a transplanted New Yorker, Dean has however fought his party by being fiscally conservative, opposing national gun control and favouring the death penalty in some circumstances.

Dean’s understanding of Canadian health care and foreign policy would make him sympathetic to Canada’s values and objectives, said Johnston.

“If he were a Canadian politician, he’d fit very comfortably in Mr. (Prime Minister Jean) Chretien’s cabinet as a kind of middle-of-the-road Liberal.”

Dean’s support for abortion and gay civil unions and his opposition to the war in Iraq would make many Canadians feel more comfortable with him as president than with opponents, including incumbent George W. Bush, said Harold Waller, a professor of political science at McGill University.

“His own orientation is probably closest to where most Canadians would stand on those issues than any of the other major candidates.”

But Waller warns that another candidate’s proposals that boost the Canadian economy could be better for Canada than presidential empathy, he said.

While Canadians may look favourably at Dean, Republican supporters south of the border have disparaged his links with Canada.

“If you like Canada, you’ll love Howard Dean,” said a headline in the GOPUSA, a conservative online publication.

The column says those wishing for Dean to defeat Bush “can always move to Canada and pretend their guy won.”

These type of attacks aren’t likely to be successful, said Daniel Drezner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

“Blasting someone in the U.S. by saying they tend to sympathize with Canada won’t really sell that well,” he said in an interview.

MONTPELIER — While former Gov. Howard Dean opposes efforts to ban gay marriages — such as those suggested this week by President Bush — the presidential hopeful won’t push for a federal law making them legal, his campaign said Thursday.

According to campaign manager Joe Trippi, Dean believes that all people are entitled to equal treatment under the law, but the question of what constitutes marriage is a matter for the states to sort out.

In the end, Trippi said, the five-term governor would do nothing to prevent states from granting the rights and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex partners, but he does not think the federal government should dictate what marriage is.

“What we’d try to do is make sure every American has the same rights under the law,” Trippi said. “Yes, the governor would oppose the kind of law the president talked about. But the last time he checked, you don’t go to the federal government for your marriage license.”

The position is akin to the often tenuous one Dean took during the wrenching debates over Vermont’s landmark civil unions law. Shortly after the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples must be granted the same rights and responsibilities as their heterosexual counterparts, Dean told reporters that while the decision was a correct one, gay marriages made him “uncomfortable, the same as anyone else.”

The tension between his personal discomfort and his acceptance of the state Supreme Court’s decision was evident when he quietly signed the bill into law.

“I can’t imagine any governor in this country who would take the position that I have taken on this bill. In fact, there hasn’t been one,” Dean said in 1999. “But I also think it’s important to acknowledge there are two very strongly divided sides in this debate and I think sometimes signing ceremonies take on the trappings of triumphalism. That was not appropriate in this case.”

Even the civil unions law itself — which was signed a little more than three years ago — nonetheless defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

For Dean, Trippi insisted, the issue isn’t over whether gay and lesbians have the right to marry.

“As president, Dean would make sure everyone is treated equally under the law,” he said.

Recalling Vermont’s experience with the issue, Trippi said Dean believes states have to find their own ways to ensure that same-sex couples have the same rights as married couples.

“You have to have a discussion, a real debate,” Trippi said. “I think that you have to go through the same painful process Vermont went through in every state. Vermont’s just happened to come first.”

William Saletan and Avi Zenilman, writing for Slate, report on “The Worldview of Howard Dean, His instincts on foreign policy and national security.”

Counterinsurgency: In 1974, while exploring Southeast Asia, Dean’s brother Charlie was arrested by Communist rebels in Laos, evidently on suspicion of espionage. The rebels were backed by Vietnam and opposed by the United States, which listed Charlie as POW/MIA. The U.S. Embassy to Laos pledged to push for Charlie’s release, but he was executed. The rebels won the war and became the current Laotian government. In 2002, Howard Dean said he thought “the North Vietnamese basically ordered [Charlie] killed.” Dean said he didn’t believe his brother had been spying, “but for all I know he was in the CIA.” Dean added, “We were bombing the hell out of [Laos]. We were denying we were bombing them while they were denying they were holding any American prisoners.”

War and unilateralism: Dean caught fire in the 2004 presidential race based on his opposition to the Iraq war. But in July 2003, he cautioned that he had “told the peace people not to fall in love with me.” He claims to have supported every U.S. military intervention after Vietnam and before Iraq. In August 2002, he said he would support a unilateral invasion of Iraq if President Bush could “show that there’s evidence [Saddam] has either atomic or biological weapons and can deliver.” Dean ended up opposing the war on the grounds that Bush 1) should have worked through the United Nations to disarm Iraq (or to depose Saddam, if Iraq failed to comply with inspections); 2) should have given more consideration to the concerns of U.S. allies; and 3) never should have claimed that Iraq presented an imminent biological or nuclear threat to the United States.

After the war, Dean said, “I am not a pacifist. I believe there are times when pre-emptive force is justified, but there has to be an immediate threat, and there just wasn’t in this case.” However, when U.S. forces killed Saddam Hussein’s sons, Dean remarked, “It’s a victory for the Iraqi people … but it doesn’t have any effect on whether we should or shouldn’t have had a war. … I think in general the ends do not justify the means.”

Defense spending: On June 22, 2003, after rival candidate Dennis Kucinich proposed cuts in military programs, Dean replied, “I don’t agree with Dennis about cutting the Pentagon budget when we’re in the middle of difficulty with terror attacks.”

The next time you hear somebody say that Governor Dean is a pacifist or that he is weak on national defense because he opposed the invasion of Iraq, don’t believe it. Howard Dean opposed the invasion of Iraq because he believed the Bush Administration did not truthfully present a valid justification for the invasion. When (and if) President Dean sends our kids off to war, you can bet it will be for a valid and just reason. He will not sacrifice our troops for the enrichment of his friends and supporters, as did George W. Bush.