What Was Your First Indication?

What Was Your First Indication? - The PiPress headline says it all: "Some Fear Dean May Be Next McGovern".

Bruce Reed, who served as President Bill Clinton's chief domestic adviser and now directs the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said the other day: "A campaign based on telling the left everything it wants to hear would be a disaster in the general election. ... Dean has thrown his lot in with a neo-McGovern crowd, and what that crowd likes about him is what the rest of America won't like."

There are concerns that Dean's visceral anger at Bush would alienate the moderate and independent voters who tend to decide national elections, because those voters don't appear to dislike the President. And there are concerns that Dean, a New Englander who opposed the Iraq war and signed a bill legalizing gay civil unions, would be wiped out in the South - which means that, to beat Bush, he would need to win 70 percent of the electoral votes everywhere else.

Dick Polman, the Philly Enquirer writer for this story, hints at the divide in the Democrat party that's floating Dean at the moment - the big, maybe unbridgeable, split between the Volvo Democrats and the Chevy Democrats:

Dean is the insurgent outsider in this race. The Democrats usually have one: Gary Hart in 1984, Paul Tsongas in 1992, Bill Bradley in 2000. They generally attract the party's white, well-educated, professional voters - but as Dunn, a former Bradley aide, warned, "They often can't attract the blue-collar workers and less-educated voters. Hart couldn't. Neither could Tsongas or Bradley. Can Dean reach them?"

In theory, maybe - he's not that far left on many issues that genuinely matter to the blue-collar voter.

But as long as the war is perceived as successful among the blue-collar Americans that provide a disproportionate number of the troops, his anti-war stance is a boat anchor.

And I think the next six months or so will see Iraq start to settle down, and the post-liberation chaos start to form itself into some sort of order.

Posted by Mitch at July 23, 2003 06:44 AM