December
12, 2003
Gore, Dean Form 'Anti-Clinton' Party, Well Left of Center
By Mort
Kondracke
"We need to remake the Democratic party," former Vice President
Al Gore declared Tuesday in endorsing former Vermont Gov. Howard
Dean. What did he mean by that? Judging by where Al Gore has been
and where he's heading, "remaking" the party means tearing it
away from the winning formula established by his old mentor, President
Bill Clinton.
Clinton was a "new Democrat," a "triangulator," a centrist who
could steal issues from the Republicans and appeal to Southerners
and moderates as well as the traditional Democratic base vote.
Gore, too, once was a moderate, a founder of the centrist Democratic
Leadership Council and a hawk on foreign policy. He's been moving
left ever since he won the Democratic nomination in 2000 and that's
culminated now in his partnership with Dean.
Old Clinton hands think that Gore's endorsement-in Harlem, where
Bill Clinton has his office-was also a down-payment on a possible
second run for president in 2008, as an opponent of Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.)
Later Tuesday in Iowa, boiling over with emotion, Gore declared:
"this nation has never in our two centuries made a worse
foreign policy mistake than what George W. Bush made in putting
our troops into that quagmire in Iraq.
It was a horrible misjudgment. And therefore, it is not
a minor matter to me that the candidate for the nomination of
my party that had the good judgment, experience and sense to
feel and see and articulate the right choice was Howard Dean."
Dean was not only different from other major 2004 candidates
in opposing the war - he also differed from Sen. Clinton, who
voted to authorize President Bush to go to war and then voted
for the $87 billion to finance occupation and reconstruction operations
in the aftermath.
Sen. Clinton appears to be setting herself up as a presidential
candidate - like her husband - who can appeal to both the Democratic
base that comprises 30-odd percent of the electorate and to the
Independent 40 percent that it takes to win general elections.
Following Gore on the Harlem program, Dean made it clear that
he's mainly about solidifying the base, not reaching out to Independents.
"In 2002, we lost a lot of races in the Democratic party because
we decided that we were going to go to the swing votes and we
were going to try to get them and our base was going to come along
later on," Dean said.
"I think it's important in this campaign that we recognize those
people who were with us all along," he said. "And so we made a
conscious decision to start with women, to start with the African-American
community, to start with the trade union movement," as opposed
to following what he said was the losing strategy of voting 85
percent of the time with President Bush.
Dean has based his entire nomination strategy on being the anti-Bush,
the vessel of Democratic hatred for the president. Gore, too,
has steadily become more acerbic toward Bush.
In February 2002, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks and Bush's State of the Union message declaring Iraq,
Iran and North Korea, Gore spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations
in New York and said, "there is value in calling evil by its name."
He went on to say that, as to Iraq, "a final reckoning...should
be on the table," provided that "this time, if we resort to force,
we must absolutely get it right... Failure cannot be an option."
Steadily, though, Gore has been more militantly against the war
and against Bush, accusing him in one speech of "a systematic
effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology
that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty."
And, in another speech, Gore said that the Bush administration
was "determined to use fear as a political tool to consolidate
its power and escape any accountability for its use."
At the Democratic convention in 2000, Gore stopped being a Clintonian
centrist and became a "people versus the powerful" populist. His
only nod to the center was the naming of Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.)
as his runningmate.
Lieberman aides noted that Lieberman found out he was Gore's
choice from media reports then - just as he found out about Gore's
endorsement of Dean.
On NBC's "Today" show, Lieberman correctly observed that "Al
Gore is endorsing somebody who has taken positions that are diametrically
opposite to what Al himself has said he believed over the years...strong
on defense, for tax cuts and against walls of protectionism that
take away jobs."
Gore, the 2000 populist, nearly won the presidential election.
Could Dean do the same, appealing only to the Democratic base
vote and simply bringing more base-like voters-young, computer-savvy
liberals-to the polls?
Pundits say that Dean will do more than that - that, once nominated,
he'll move to the center on budgets, defense and health care.
But that's going to be hard to do. After all, he's declared that
he will repeal all of Bush's tax cuts, even for the middle class.
It looks to me as though the Dean-Gore party is stuck far to
the left side of the political spectrum and that it will take
Hillary Clinton, of all people, to drag it back to the center.
Mort Kondracke is the Executive
Editor of Roll Call.
