Slate: How Anti-War Is Dean, Really? (interesting June, 2002 quote) [View All]

[Karmadillo]

This is written by Mickey Kaus, so one might want to take it with a grain of salt (well, everything should be taken with a grain of salt, but with Kaus and Saletan types, maybe an extra grain or two is in order). I think the Dean quote below plus his stated support for the Biden-Lugar resolution make him much less anti-war than the media like to portray him, but I also think not everyone will agree with me. So it goes.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2091291/

Hello! Opposition Researchers! Here's a paragraph from a David Broder column dated June 30, 2002:

He had been asked where he would find fault with President Bush, and he replied, "As far as domestic policy is concerned, I can't think of anything he's done that I agree with." He ticked off a list of Bush "outrages," ranging from an education bill he called the "largest unfunded mandate in history" to Bush's "appointment of ideologues to the courts." Heads were nodding in agreement. And then he added, almost as a throwaway line, "I think he's done a good job on the war on terrorism."

The "he" in question was Gov. Howard Dean, who is now on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination by virtue of his angry opposition to the war in Iraq. But Dean wasn't showing much of that anger at the end of June, 2002. In fact, Broder's piece chides Dean for failing to pay sufficient heed to the anti-war sentiments then cropping up on the Democratic left. (At the time, Dean's big anti-Bush issues were health insurance and tax cuts).

There are two interpretations of Dean's transformation from a candidate who said Bush was doing "a good job on the war on terrorism" to the Howard Dean most voters think they know today. One, presented forcefully in Monday's Robert Kagan WaPo op-ed, is that Dean sincerely supported the overall war on terror but thought the Iraq invasion was a misstep, the "wrong war at the wrong time." In June 30, 2002, after all, the military strike against Hussein was more than half a year away.

But there's a second, more troubling interpretation, which is that Dean shifted to a strong anti-war position not because of Bush's Iraq actions, but because he saw that that was where the Democratic party's activist base wanted him to go. In June 30, 2002, after all, it wasn't very hard to see the Iraq conflict looming on the horizon. President Bush had already included Iraq in his "axis of evil." Vice-President Cheney had toured the Middle East to drum up support for an effort to topple Saddam. On June 17, 2002--two weeks before Dean praised Bush's "good job"--former President Clinton delivered a speech criticizing Bush for concentrating on Iraq instead of the Israeli-Palestinian issue...

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