Sidney Blumenthal: 'Dean has reinvented triangulation.'

[WilliamPitt]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1114376,00.html

This man can survive shark attacks

Howard Dean's party rivals scent blood, but he's still unscathed

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday January 1, 2004
The Guardian

The presidential party of the party that doesn't hold the White House is like a ghost party that miraculously springs to life in the January of election year. It exists apart from the congressional party and often against it, and it does not proceed through the tortuous path of legislation but a swift and unforgiving campaign. Though the curtain is just rising on 2004, the action is near the end of the first act.
Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, arrives at his position as frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination by outpacing three successive alternative frontrunners. Paradoxically, the fire concentrated on him has only bolstered him.

Dean's frankness has been accompanied by apparent gaffes - for example, his remark that the country is not safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein, a stunning event that reversed President Bush's poll slide. In a double whiplash effect, the other candidates, who had been trying to persuade Democratic voters that, while they had initially supported the Iraq war, they were against it all along, repositioned. "Dean will melt in a minute once Republicans start going after him," charged Senator Joseph Lieberman. Dean "makes a series of embarrassing gaffes that underscore the fact that he is not well-equipped to challenge Bush," said Congressman Dick Gephardt. "I don't think (Dean) can win either," added Senator John Kerry. Every time Dean makes an artless comment, his opponents see blood in the water. There may be blood, they may be sharks, but he emerges unscathed.

(snip)

The sin of the "Washington Democrats" in the eyes of Democrats isn't simply their fecklessness; it is that they have appeared as appeasers. Whether Dean or another Democrat can win the war is another war. But the first requirement for becoming the wartime leader is to understand that there is a war.

Lieberman has declared that Dean is not in the mould of Clinton in 1992, as though attempting to repeat the past makes a New Democrat born again. But Dean's pragmatic strategy may be another version of that which Clinton adopted after he suffered the loss of the Democratic Congress in 1994. By defining his position apart from the rightwing Republicans and the "Washington Democrats", as he calls them, Dean has reinvented triangulation.

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