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Dean, Stewed in Weber's Kettle
Posted 12:08 a.m., April 23, 2004
I notice an interesting thread linking what presidential political advisor Karl Rove has recently told Bob Woodward and what another presidential advisor, Vin Weber, said in a speech I attended on Dec. 17, 2003, in St. Paul, Minn.
The topic is Howard Dean.
According to Bob Woodward's new book, "Plan of Attack," Karl Rove was gleeful by February 2004 that Dean would not be the Democrats' nominee. "The good news for us is that Dean is not the nominee," Woodward quotes Rove saying. "One of Dean's strengths is that he could say, 'I'm not part of that crowd down there.'"
Kerry is part of the beltway in-crowd, according to Rove. Even more important, Kerry has wavered on his stance against the war in Iraq, a problem Dean never had.
Below, I reproduce a partial transcript of the Weber speech, focusing in particular on what he had to say about the then-presumptive Democratic nominee Dean. His analysis, though now outdated because of the primaries that followed over the subsequent two months, reflects fascinating strategic thinking by a key presidential operative.
The Weber speech, incidentally, was delivered before a meeting of the Minnesota-based conservative think tank, The Center for the American Experiment.
Dean: Another Goldwater?
Following is a partial transcript of Weber's Dec. 17 speech at the University Club, St. Paul, Minn.
"Is there any bad news going into this election? Well, the bad news is sort of the good news. And that is the frontrunner for the Democratic election is Howard Dean. I think he's going to get nominated. It could happen another way.
"But why that is both bad news and good news is that he is either the willing or the unwilling captive of the movement that he has created, which is a left-wing political movement. The arguments about whether Howard Dean was a centrist governor of Vermont, or whether he takes this position on capital punishment or that position on gun control, is absolutely irrelevant. The point is, he has allowed himself to become the vehicle for a very left-wing movement in the Democratic Party, across this country. And there's just no question about this.
"It's radical environmentalists, radical feminists and a whole range of very left-wing folks that are taking over the party all across the country.
"In many ways, that's why I argue that the comparison to George McGovern is not an accurate historical comparison. It's much more like the Goldwater movement in the Republican Party, in which Barry Goldwater ... became the vehicle for a right-wing Republican movement in this country which at times got out of hand, with the John Birch Society and those folks.
The Deaniac Factor
"Dean's movement includes people that believe--as does Dean himself sort hint that he believes--that George Bush knew about the attack on the World Trade Center ahead of time. Dean sort of said, 'It was an interesting theory.' Well, the people that back him think it's true. And if you look at the stuff that's going on in the Internet around the Dean campaign, these are truly the whacked-out, paranoid left-wing cuckoos of American society, and that's the core of his campaign.
"The good news of course is that affords in my judgment an opportunity for the president of a victory for our principals that I believe is right.
"The only negative thing, I would say, and I say this just to sort of caution people a little bit. Goldwater lost all but six or seven states. But he presaged a movement in American politics to the right and transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle of conservative political values.
"It hadn't really been that before--the party of Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, Thomas Dewey. It may have been in some ways little more conservative than the other half, but it was not a vehicle for conservative thought it was after Goldwater ran in 1964. And he happened to be ahead of the wave that resulted in some of the [conservative] triumphs that we're talking about today.
Leftward Tide?
"The only word of caution I would say is it's not good for us as conservatives to see the Democratic Party conceivably become the vehicle for a left-wing political movement in this country.
"Left-wing--not just in the sense of being more liberal than Republicans, but in the sense in which we used to think only of European political parties. The great strength of this country, in my view, is that we have never developed a leftist party in the European model. It's been a great frustration of left-wing intellectuals in this country that we've never developed a left-wing political party in the European model.
"The Dean campaign would like that to make that happen to the Democrats, frankly. It's not just war, it's rejection of the trade agreements of the last 10 years, it's a tax increase for all Americans, it's a re-regulation of American business. It's a whole range of issues.
"That, ultimately--even though it may lose the election in 2004, and I think it would--is not a good development for us, to see the emergence of a left-wing party of a scale that we haven't seen perhaps since the Roosevelt administration."
Kevblog parting note: A long profile that I wrote on Vin Weber, which includes a short portion of the University Club speech, soon will be appearing in Minnesota Law and Politics magazine.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
