Centrist Democrats Worry About Dean's Candidacy, Claim He's Too Liberal [View All]

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Centrist Democrats: Don't Vote for Dean
Centrist Democrats Worry About Dean's Candidacy, Claim He's Too Liberal

The Associated Press


PHILADELPHIA
July 28 —

Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean's upstart campaign has excited the party's liberal activists, but centrists have only one thing to say about the candidate: Don't vote for him.

Many members of the Democratic Leadership Council are convinced that Dean's opposition to the war in Iraq makes him too liberal for middle America, and they worry that if he wins the nomination it could undo years of work to persuade the country that the Democratic Party isn't controlled by its left wing.



No group has taken a more hostile view to his candidacy than the DLC, and that attitude was evident Monday on the final day of the group's "National Conversation," a two-day convention aimed at developing a strategy for unseating President Bush.

In materials distributed to hundreds of attendees, the DLC leadership wrote off Dean's early popularly as a phenomenon of an Internet-driven campaign that is exploiting a "visceral hatred" of George W. Bush among those on the far left which the nation does not share.

"The Internet may be giving angry, protest-oriented activists the rope they need to hang the party," wrote Randolph Court in the DLC's bimonthly newsletter, The New Democrat Blueprint.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030728_1721.html