For the first time in my life I have a chance to participate in a presidential race where my vote actually matters. I'm referring to the Washington caucuses on Saturday. I'm not a big fan of media handicappers' pronouncements of make-or-break, but I really do think that if Dean can't win here he's not going to win anywhere. I assume the rest of the state will be tougher, but here in Seattle he's enormously popular. I'll bet that if someone were to do a regional comparison of Dean support with density of Starbucks franchises, there'd be a high correlation.

There's really two questions here: which candidate one likes best, and which one has the best chance of beating George Bush. Let's settle the second one first, since it's a shorter answer.

Even though it's not always stated openly, I believe this question of "electability" is the main argument being put forward by those who prefer Kerry. It's a serious argument. Like most Democrats, I'd prefer any of the leading Democratic candidates to George Bush, so if one of them really does have a better chance of winning, that matters.

But after have mulled over that question for a few weeks, I'm just not convinced. As far as I can tell, the idea that Dean is "unelectable" is based on little more than the fact that everyone says he is. But where is the serious analysis or evidence? By contrast, Kerry, we are told, has lots of political experience, is calm and congenial, is well respected by his peers, and simply "looks" more presidential. Well, yes, but the same could be said of Walter Mondale. Did that make him more "electable" than Gary Hart? I don't think so. Also like Mondale, Kerry is part of the political establishment which hasn't been very impressive regardless of which party is in power, he gets oodles of money from various unpleasant special interest groups, and he has a long voting record which can easily be characterized as "extreme liberal" in the sort of mean-spirited way which is the standard strategy for defeating Democratic presidential candidates. Which of those qualities make him more "electable"?

I don't mean to pick on Kerry. I don't think he's any less electable than any of the other leading candidates. My point is that I think that any one of the candidates is wide open to a smear campaign of vicious attacks and misrepresentation. The only difference is that with Dean we've already seen it happen, whereas with Kerry and Edwards and Clark it's still in the GOP playbook.

Democratic voters are suffering from a lack of imagination. In the days leading up to Iowa and New Hampshire we all watched the other candidates and the press gang up on Dean, telling us everything that's wrong with him -- he's too mean, his wife's a frump, he won't promise more tax cuts, Vermont is an eccentric backwater state that doesn't count as real political experience, his supporters are all a bunch of twenty-something freaks and geeks, etc. Seeing this, all the ordinary non-activist Democrats who thitherto weren't paying much attention thought, "Yikes! This guy has all sorts of negatives that could be a problem in the general election. I'd better throw my support behind someone more mainstream who won't be so vulnerable." The delusion here is that there is such a thing as a safe candidate who can't be smeared. Well, wake up. No matter who the nominee is, by August he's going to be so covered with mud that you won't even recognize him, and all the ordinary non-activist Democrats will be scratching their heads, saying, "Gosh, why didn't they warn us about that when we were debating 'electability'?"

I guarantee you, by convention time, Republicans will be saying, "It's such a shame, there are so many good moderate Democrats. Why did they have to go and nominate this guy who is from the extreme left-wing of the party?" This is a one-size-fits-all script. It makes no difference who the nominee is. Even if it's someone who used to vote Republican (like Clark), was considered a friend by local Republicans (like Dean), or is considered by liberal Democrats to be a right-winger (like Lieberman), the GOP only needs to say, "Don't be fooled by Democratic white-washing. He's pretending to be a moderate, but let's take a look at how liberal he really is." If you don't believe it, where have you been hiding for every presidential election since ... well, I don't know, since before I can remember.

Aside from all that, I just don't think this general election is going to be about the Democrat. I can't back this up with any evidence other than my own political instinct, so maybe you agree or maybe you don't, but I think this election is really going to be about George Bush. If the Bush team can hold things together and avoid any major stumbles, then he wins, no matter who the opponent is. If some scandal gets out of control and blows up, and the Bush machine starts to break apart, then he loses, no matter who the opponent is.

In other words, I think the race is going to be Bush vs non-Bush. That being the case, you may as well try to make non-Bush be the guy you'd most like to see as president. Which brings us to the second point.

A while back, in his comments section (the link says zero, but it's there), one of Orcinus's readers takes him to task for straying from non-partisanship:

I don't know Orcinus well enough to know if that's an accurate characterization of him, but there are certainly plenty of us whom it does describe (and I would add Howard Dean himself to the list). My only objection would be that the word "centrist" (and also "moderate") reinforces the false notion of a left-right spectrum, with centrists being some sort of middle ground that compromises the two. Many of our criticisms of the Democrat Party might reasonably be characterized as coming from the right, but just as many come from the left, and most defy the left-right model altogether.

I've been a Democrat for as long as I've been registered to vote, but I've never been reliably partisan, and I've even voted Republican occasionally. Most notably, in 1994 I supported Pete Wilson for a second term as California governor. (This will be relevant in about 20 paragraphs, I promise....) In the old Benzene I criticized Democratic policies as often as Republican ones, and I often spoke favorably of Republican ideas, so much so that many of my liberal friends questioned whether I was really one of them at all.

The reason we non-partisan Democrats have "joined with the far left in total opposition to the Bush administration" is not that we've become far leftists, but rather that Bush is so deserving of opposition. I can't speak for others, but for me at least the alliance is temporary. Once Bush loses his iron grip on the Party and the post-Bush GOP explodes like post-Tito Yugoslavia, I will happily return to complaining about what's wrong with the Democrats and speaking kindly of those Republican ideas which are good sense.

When I first heard about Howard Dean last summer, I expected to dislike him. I had heard that he was the angry, left-wing outsider from Vermont (where they elect Bernie Sanders), so I imagined something like a white Jesse Jackson. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I happened to see an interview of him -- one of those lovely long slow interviews that you can only see on C-Span or maybe Charlie Rose, as opposed to a quick-punch confrontation à la Chris Matthews or a vapid Hollywood interrogation à la Diane Sawyer -- and I found that I liked him a lot. For a few months after that I had a positive impression of Dean, and I often defended him in forums like RMO from attacks that I thought unwarranted, but I still wasn't really committed to him as my one favored candidate.

My political mind is still fixated in 1984, the year I started paying attention to politics. I tend to view all Democrats against the 1980s-era question of "neoliberalism", which is pretty much a question about the nature of government spending. Some day maybe I'll write about that, but for now either you know what I'm talking about or you don't. (Quick refresher course: Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas were neoliberals, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis were not, and Bill Clinton was the synthesis who managed to bridge the gap.) In 1992 Clinton put an end to this rift in the Party -- and it may not be a coincidence that that's about the time I stopped paying attention to politics for several years. Now that he's gone, the question is back and relevant as ever.

Listening to the candidates on the stump but not studying very carefully, I got it in my head that Edwards, Lieberman and Gephardt were on the wrong side of my litmus test, while Kerry and Clark, along with Dean, were potentially recoverable as "neoliberals". It was someone on RMO who clarified my thinking on this, in the context of Kerry vs Edwards. He pointed out that, in spite of what impression I may have gotten from their rhetoric, Kerry's voting record is in fact more traditionally "liberal" than Edwards'. Pondering on this revelation, I realized that I don't like Kerry (or Clark) any better than any of the traditional Democrats, and the only one I really like is Dean. This was all going through my head some time around the IA-NH week, and at the same time I was sorting through the electability question. With those both settled, I'm now ready to vote for Dean, and maybe even promote him a little if it's not too late.

I keep digressing. Like any candidate, Dean has several standard lines in his stump speeches. Here are some of the ones that mean something to me:

"The other candidates say they'll solve all your problems; I know I can't do that." It's a gimmicky line, of course, but that's necessary -- not just for the campaign, but for governing as well. In spite of their professed skepticism of politicians' promises, on the whole the American public really does hope to get a free lunch from the government. This sort of rhetoric can help change that.

One of the things which is desperately wrong with American politics today is that it is almost entirely based on handing out favors. Aside from Dean, no one is even remotely close to the old Kennedy theme of "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". Whether it's tax cuts or new government programs or protecting businesses from competition or not taking away benefits, everyone's platform is about what sort of free goodies the candidate will provide for the voters.

The tax cuts are a good illustration. I don't think Bush's tax cuts were entirely bad. I'm not enough of an economist to analyze the specifics, but I understand that when an economy is in recession it can be helpful to stimulate it with a quick burst of money. I couldn't tell you the best way to do it, but clearly the stimulus package did provide some stimulus, and to whatever extent that worked it was a good thing. I also think it probably fixed up a few incentives for businesses that will make them more productive. On the other hand, I think it probably messed up some incentives as well, tilted the balance of the tax burden in a way which will widen the divide between rich and poor, and drastically reduced the government's revenue at a time when there's no prospect of reducing spending to match.

Any examination of the tax cuts ought to distinguish between the good parts and the bad parts. Of course we can't expect candidates to do detailed analysis on the campaign trail. Presidential candidates have to paint with a broad brush, and presumably any one of them will have a more varied and detailed approach when actually making tax policy. But the broad brush strokes are still informative.

Kerry's line is typical of the mainstream Democratic Party. He says he'll repeal the tax cut for the rich but preserve the tax cuts for the middle class. Conveniently, no one talks much about what actually counts as "middle class", but if you take a poll, you'll find that something like 80% of Americans consider themselves to be "middle class". Thus, what "middle class" really means is "me". Plug that into your babelfish, along with "rich" equals "someone else" and "tax cuts" equals "a check in my hand", and you see that the real debate goes like this:

Kerry: I'm going to give out free money to you, but not to that other guy.

Bush: I'm going to give out free money to everyone!

It's the same thing with the budget. Bush's recent budget claims are so absurd that it doesn't take much skill to skewer them -- why do the deficit projections end right after the end of your second term? how come you don't list the $160 billion for Iraq? Why should we believe you when today's deficit is 3000% of what you predicted two years ago? -- but assuming that Democrats (or anyone) ought to be held to higher standards than that, who is really speaking sense about the budget? The Democrats are all quick to lambast Bush for turning a large surplus into an enormous deficit, but none of them is talking about ways to raise more revenues nor about any significant reductions in government spending.

Here is where I finally get my tie-in to Pete Wilson. When Wilson was elected governor of California in 1990, he inherited an economy which was headed off a cliff due to years of fiscal indiscipline. After mouthing the usual political platitudes to get elected, once he was in office he immediately set about raising taxes and cutting spending. Drastically. His approval ratings plummeted to around 10% and he was hated by Republicans and Democrats alike.

What the federal government needs now is someone with the guts to do the same sort of thing. Just as important, the United States needs a president who can stand up to the American public and justify it. Not just to get enough political support in Congress, but to start changing the culture. Two years ago the economy was in recession and the nation had recently been attacked. The public was ready to be told what they could do to help, and George Bush's answer was to say that the best way to help the economy is to go out and spend some money. Not save, not work, not produce, but consume.

If we're ever going to address problems like health care, Social Security, deficits, and declining dollars, someone needs to tell the public that prosperity doesn't come for free, and all these problems are direct and indirect results of trying to live off the collective credit card for more than a generation. With regard to government programs, that means recognizing that you get what you pay for, and you can't separate the two. Of course, everyone wants benefits and no one wants to pay taxes, but you can't have it both ways. Some government programs are worth paying for and some aren't. If something is a good buy, we should get it, and taxpayers should stop griping about the cost; if something isn't a good buy, we should do without, and people should stop whining about cutting the program.

Of all the candidates on both parties, the only one I could imagine saying anything at all like that is Howard Dean. Not just because he's already said some of it ("politicians have been lying to you" sounds easy, but most of them can't even pull that off), and not just because of his record as a stern budget balancer, but because of the attitude and political persona he displays.

Another of Dean's standard lines is a gentle reminder that Kerry (not to mention Bush) has a long history of funding his campaigns with contributions from "special interest groups", whereas he (Dean) got all his money from small donations and thus is beholden only to the people. This too is a corny line, but there's something to it.

"Special interest groups" is another one of those common terms that is never properly defined. Usually, it refers to the other guy's supporters but not one's own. I think that political influence is rarely so clear as exchanging legislation for contributions in quid pro quo, and I don't think it's so organized as Rockefeller and his Trilateral Bilderberg friends pulling everyone's strings. (I do think Chase Manhattan Bank precipitated the November 1979 crisis in Iran in order to save $4 billion in bad loans, but that's another story.) There is, however, an influential class which pervades our larger institutions, including both the government and large media corporations. Although most members of the influential class are rich, it's not strictly a measure of personal wealth.

Government policy (and, more recently, media coverage) tends to reflect the views and interests of this class. When candidates take money from these people, they are brought into the culture and, even without any quid pro quo, they gradually come to see things their way. With only a handful of very eccentric exceptions, no elected politician is immune from this influence, and neither is Howard Dean. Still, the fact that he has raised more money from outside the usual network of corporate contributors gives him a certain amount of insulation from their influence. I think this is important, so in my mind that's another plus for him as a candidate.

[There were a few more issues I was going to add to the list, but I've run on long enough. I might follow up next week, if Dean's campaign hasn't become irrelevant by then.]

2:14:23 PM  [permalink]  comment []