November 16, 2006
Political Memo
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
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So it was that Stan Greenberg, the Democratic pollster, and Mr. Carville used the forum of a Monitor Breakfast, a gathering of newsmakers and reporters, to say Mr. Dean wasted an opportunity to make historic gains by refusing to take resources out of his effort to build up parties in all 50 states and put them into Congressional races.
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Mr. Carville, whose close ties to former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York have prompted speculation that he is attacking Mr. Dean on their behalf, said the Democratic National Committee had taken out a $10 million line of credit and used barely half of it.
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Aides to Mr. and Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Carville had not cleared his attacks on Mr. Dean with them.
The attacks set off recriminations in Mr. Dean’s base, state parties that have benefited from his decision to channel millions of dollars to them.
“Asking Dean to step down now, after last week, is equivalent to asking Eisenhower to resign after the Normandy invasion,” Mr. Fowler said. “It’s just nonsense.
“Carville and Greenberg — those people are my friends — they are just dead wrong. They wanted all that money to go to Washington consultants and speechwriters and pollsters. This kind of nonsense is destructive of the party.”
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Ms. Finney expressed incredulity that Democrats would be going after Democrats in this of all weeks.
“Did he not see that we won?” she said of Mr. Carville. “Did he not read the results? If James and Stan are interested in knowing what the D.N.C. is doing and has done, they can pick up the telephone and give me a call.”
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He said Wednesday that a favored candidate, Tammy Duckworth, the severely injured Iraq war veteran running for an open Republican seat in Illinois, had lost because the Republicans had spent $1 million on negative advertisements against her in the final weekend and that he did not have the money to respond.
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There was also some lesser blame passing. Mr. Emanuel suggested that Democrats had fallen just short of picking up the seat held by Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, because Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a registered Democrat, had sought re-election on an independent line after losing the Democratic primary. That brought out more Republican votes.
Mr. Greenberg fumbled when asked in a two-part question whether he agreed with some Democrats that a botched joke by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and the White House attack on it might have made the difference in very close races where Democrats lost, like the effort to defeat Representative Heather A. Wilson in New Mexico.
“Bah-bah-bah-bah, let me go to the first question,” Mr. Greenberg said haltingly before returning, with prompting, to the original question, allowing that the Kerry episode might have “moved the needle a little bit.”
more...
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