The thing that they can accept is that the New Deal/Great Society era was a Depression driven aberration and that the country has basically been at least distrustful of government, if not conservative, from birth.

It's like Dean & the other Dwarves are deterined to prove true Zell Miller's comments about the D Party's current attitude towards the South -- that it's a region that can "go to hell".

If you referring to taking orders from the smartest women who ever trod the earth, you mean Chappaqua, not Larchmont.

If not, what does the reference to Larchmont mean?

You're right. Got my suburbs mixed up.

There is McAuliffe the political strategist (whose strategy may or may not be subtracting value from Democratic Party electoral prospects over the next few or many years -- as discussion above suggests).

More importantly, there is also McAuliffe as an intellectually and morally flawed individual who is likely to be seen as anything but off-putting by anybody who is not already on the Clinton-at-all-costs wing of the Democratic Party.

Courtesy of the "unreadable" NRO Corner I see that Howie Dean is pushing this line in the South:

"Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean told a Tallahassee audience today that southerners have to quit basing their votes on 'race, guns, God and gays.'"

At first I thought this was a plant by the Repubs. But it really was published in the Tallahassee Democrat 11/4/03:

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/breaking_news/7181952.htm

Karl Rove couldn't buy publicity like this. How many white votes would Howie get in the south against Bush? Three or four dozen?

This guy keeps running his mouth, he's gonna lose what looked like a slam-dunk nomination.

Sadly, you may well be right.

A healthy republic depends on a healthy opposition.

This one aint it.

A healthy republic depends on unhealthy parties getting clobbered in elections. Fortunately, this republic is looking healthier every November.

Our system tends to push the parties towards the middle. Part of what's happening to the Democrats is that 9/11 pushed the middle to the right.

David:

Exactly.

Unless the US is involved in hot and huge wars for decades, at some point elections will again center around domestic issues, where Dems aren't at a disadvantage.

A growing economy may help Bush be reelected, but if it keeps up until '08, it'll cause people to think that the US can afford more spending on benefits, which hasn't been a GOP strength.
Until 'W', I guess.

The Dems are at a long-term disadvantage on the real wedge issue that nobody talks about much because it's supposedly too boring: taxes. If there's one reason the GOP has pulled into parity with the Democrats, it's because the donkey party has become the high-tax party.

The last prominent Dem who talked about cutting taxes was JFK. The supposed front-runner this year, Howie, wants to jack up taxes on just about everybody who pays income tax. This is why his comments that dumb-sucker southerners (he doesn't QUITE phrase it this way, but he's close) should vote their economic interest are so lame-brained.

Howie, these folks have a very real economic interest in not paying your higher taxes - as GOP ads will continually remind them. Your argument that we'll get better services for those taxes is a lot less convincing than the bigger bite that would come out of our paychecks immediately.

It's not so hard to understand. Howie's wimpiness on national security doesn't help, but he's really gonna get slammed on the tax issue. The GOP is just waiting to portray him as a combination of McGovern (wimp) and Mondale (mad taxer).

This is where the genius of the Bush/Rove strategy for 2004 lies, as I'm sure others have commented. They're doing the really smart thing and just sitting back and letting the Democratic candidates, starting with the not-so-good Doctor Dean, dig themselves deeper and deeper holes and using up all their primary campaign funds, and then along about March when the dust has finally settled and a prospective candidate has finally emerged, W will unleash his $170 million (which will probably be a lot more than that by that time) and pound the Dem candidate-to-be to paste with ads and print pieces attacking everything he's said over the last year, and said candidate-to-be won't be able to reply effectively until he's formally nominated because he'll be so short on money.

And when he does reply, how is he going to argue against his own words caught on video tape? Maybe "the bitch set me up" worked for Marion Barry, but it won't work for a white boy from Vermont.

Terry McAuliffe needs to give about $10 million of his Global Crossing money to the party - it will help them pay the bills and may keep him in his job for another few months.

Assuming Dean doesn't go into full-bodied meltdown before the primaries (admittedly a really big if, based on the past few days), we're eventually going to see a Dean vs. Clinton showdown for control of the party's levers of power, with McAuliffe as the surrogate for Bill and Hillary. Howie's already said he wants Terry out, and I'm sure the other Democratic hopefuls (except Clark) would said the same thing if they had any more faith in their own campaigns -- McAuliffe's main masters in the party are the Clintons; the success of everybody else is secondary. The ones whose lips are buttoned right now probably fear they'll lose next November if nominated and would become a party "non-person," beamed into the political Phantom Zone, as the Hillary bandwagon gets shifted into overdrive on Nov. 3, 2004.

Even if Dean folds and doesn't get the nomination, whoever does win -- Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards -- has to realize that leaving Terry as top dog at the DNC means they'll get no effective help from their own party apparatus, and will have to rely on a complete collapse of the Bush Administration's foreign and domestic policies in 2004 in order to win. If they leave him in power, they'll be wondering by next October whether or not the Republicans or their own party officials have the longer knives out for them.