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January 28, 2004

Comments

How can there be dirty campaigning here? There are no Republicans involved! :)

Seriously, I know this will never happen, but I wish you had to identify what campaign you were calling from. Of course then we would just see 'independent groups' doing it. (sigh)

Via Andrew Sullivan, John Ellis makes the case why Kerry is the prime suspect.

Fredrik Nyman wrote:

Via Andrew Sullivan, John Ellis makes the case why Kerry is the prime suspect.

No, he does not. There is nothing in the Ellis article referring to any sort of dirty tricks by Kerry, Dean, or anyone else. In fact, Ellis argues that Dean (much like Clark and Lieberman) are essentially finished and that Kerry needs to focus his attention in the upcoming primaries against Edwards.

Of course, if we do not make the assumption that the (unverified) rumors are true, then some or many of them could just be stories started by members of the Dean campaign or Dean supporters in the hopes of garnering sympathy for their candidate and to make palatable (to his supporters or potential supporters) excuses for his incredibly poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Dean after all does have a history of using rumors and innuendo to smear his opponents as he did with the infamous “interesting theory” bit on NPR where he smeared the Bush administration over 9/11 under the guise of merely recounting the latest moon-bat theory that “Bush knew.”

Dean has nothing to lose by portraying himself to be the underdog in this race while Kerry has more incentive to make himself appear as “presidential” as possible. Strategically it would make just as much, if not more, sense for Dean to go for sympathy as it would for the front runner to waste time smearing someone who already imploded a while ago when his real target (per the Ellis article) ought to be Edwards. In which case it seems more plausible to save such tactics for taking out Edwards than Dean.

Besides which, since when is being an abortionist a liability in the Democratic primary? I could understand the concern if Dean did something sacrilegious like vetoing a bill to provide taxpayer funding for late term abortions for underage girls without their parent or a guardian’s notification but there seems to be no evidence that actually performing the procedure himself would make Dean anything less than a hero amongst the Democratic party faithful.

Katerine,

Dean fired Joe Trippi? Blog woman, blog!

Thanks.

I don't really have much to say. I don't know what Trippi is actually like, or Neel. He obviously did a great job until, say, September or October but he faltered after that. They neglected their message--both as far as policy substance and media strategy. They didn't have good ads, either. But Trippi did a lot of good, and a shakeup at this point is a huge risk. I'm hoping Neel was partly behind the strategy post-Iowa and they chose him on that basis, not just because he was the nearest convenient bigwig. I don't like the Gore advisers at all as rule, but he seems like a governing adviser and not a campaign adviser; it was the campaign folks who were truly awful.

They need a "no guts no glory" strategy as far as I'm concerned--but that does not mean bomb-throwing. It means reminding people why they admired Dean so much in the first place, and make them unwilling to settle for Kerry until forced to. A combination of passion an substance.

Needless to say I am full of ideas about what this would entail, but I'm not exactly highly placed in the Dean organization. The speech last night was an excellent start from where I sat.

"...For example, Carson said, an e-mail that proposes to be from...."

I've never had an e-mail propose to me. Damn, that's good writing!

One more thing I don't get: why Neel and not Steve Grossman? He's been with the campaign forever and used to be chair of the DNC. He's a thoroughly decent guy who I'd think "gets" the campaign better than any newbie Gore advisor.

Everyone seems to be scratching their heads at choosing Neel....maybe it's a sign that he's actually done something good we don't know about?

Incorrigibly hopeful about the Dean campaign? Who, me?

As a practical matter, it might be good to have a candidate with a real mastery of dirty tricks to take on Bush. Personally, though, I hope that whoever is doing this is exposed and ruined.

Thorley,

The way I read the article, Ellis described a "shoot the wounded" strategy, which proved successful in the 1988 R primary. Here, the wounded are everyone-but-Kerry, and in Ellis' words, Kerry is a cold fish and coldly calculating as well.

Strategically it makes sense for Kerry to use this strategy. Done right, he will inflict a crippling injury which will make it even harder for Dean to come back.

Fredrik Nyman wrote:

The way I read the article, Ellis described a "shoot the wounded" strategy, which proved successful in the 1988 R primary. Here, the wounded are everyone-but-Kerry, and in Ellis' words, Kerry is a cold fish and coldly calculating as well.

Strategically it makes sense for Kerry to use this strategy. Done right, he will inflict a crippling injury which will make it even harder for Dean to come back.

Perhaps, however that’s a far cry from your original claim that Ellis “makes the case why Kerry is the prime suspect.” Besides which the competition is now between Kerry and Edwards or maybe Clark since Dean’s support has revealed itself to be pretty thin and pretty much limited to the ideological fringe of his party. He could not even win Iowa with the support of that State’s Senator or his own neighboring State.

Do not get me wrong, I agree that Kerry is a sleazy and calculating SOB(1) but calling someone up in the middle of the night to accuse an opponent of beating his wife (can you get more clichéd than that?) or accusing him of being an abortionist (a badge of honor in Democratic circles) is simply not the sort of thing that is going to sway votes in the Democratic primary. Both Kerry and Dean know that. Which is why this sounds more like a case of Dean supporters making up a story of dirty tricks in order to anger Democratic voters to get them to rally around their guy.

TW

(1) We are talking about a guy here who staged the throwing of service medals over the White House gate but had the presence of mind to make sure that they were someone else’s medals so he could retain his for the time when being a Vietnam veteran was a political asset rather than a liability. That with his being on both sides of Operation: Desert Storm, voting to gut the CIA’s funding before UN weapons inspectors were kicked out of Iraq while complaining later about intelligence failures in Iraq, and his waffling on Operation: Iraqi Freedom denotes a person who is more prone to crass political calculations in making his moves rather than someone who utilizes such brutish and obvious tactics.

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