COUNTERINSURGENCY

A Front-Running Insurgent: Don't discount the excitement around Howard Dean. (ALBERT R. HUNT, July 20, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

For both the former Vermont governor and the Democratic Party, this unusual situation--a surging insurgent before there's an establishment favorite--affords opportunities and pitfalls.

The Dean base largely is what pollster Stan Greenberg calls the "secular warriors"--largely white, middle- to upper-middle-class, non-churchgoing, non-gun-owning voters. With his singular--among major candidates--opposition to the Iraq war, he became the favorite of more Democrats who intensely dislike and mistrust George W. Bush, dating back to the 2000 election controversy. Dean campaign chief Joe Trippi argues his camp's growing band of supporters are not only anti-Bush and antiwar, and anti-Washington insider, but are willing, even eager, to make sacrifices for a greater good.

The candidate behind all this is considerably less ideological than often depicted; he's a reformer, not a liberal or a progressive. His priorities are fiscal discipline, health care, children and, he says, foreign policy; social issues are secondary. Even on national security, this isn't a left-winger. The war, he argues, was wrong, but it would be a huge mistake to pull out of Iraq and he acknowledges the defense budget can't be cut.

Mr. Trippi doesn't worry about the "Birkenstock liberal" rap; when reporters go to Vermont, they'll discover the real Dean.

The "real Dean" was a very popular governor in a Left-of-center New England state but by the end of his stay in office had somehow managed to revive a Republican Party that to this day has no superior personalities or particularly adept politicians at the top, yet still has the governor's seat and half the legislature. By endorsing Vermont Supreme Court decisions that required equalization of education funding (and therefore hiked taxes on local property owners) and adoption of some type of gay marriage-like institution and by supporting the state's cumbersome environmental permitting process, Mr. Dean unwittingly helped foster the "Take Back Vermont" movement, a genuinely grassroots campaign fueled by anger at the governing elites, who are perceived in the state as being mainly yuppie imports (Flatlanders) or, even worse, folks who haven't become Vermonters but maintain second houses there. Regardless of anything else he did, that is the legacy the GOP will drape around his neck--taxes, government regulations, gay marriage--and you can just see the ads now, with picturesque farmers making the case against him.


MORE:
-PROFILE: See Howard Run: Vermont governor Howard Dean is off and running for the White House. But why is he doing it, and where will he end up? (Charles P. Pierce, 11/24/2002, Boston Globe) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2003 7:41 AM