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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Dean, McAuliffe and the DNC wine and dine the party faithful in New York, pretending affirmative action, abortion and ethanol are really what's on their minds.
Apr 2, 2003 | On Tuesday evening the most credible antiwar presidential candidate came into a crowd of wealthy liberals on the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- "ground zero of antiwar sentiment," as described by Judith Hope, a former New York state Democratic Party chair -- and he hardly mentioned the war at all.
"Nobody asked me about it," explained Dr. Howard Dean, the feisty former governor of Vermont, when asked about his reticence.
But surely Dean -- who has distinguished himself from his better-financed and better-known primary opponents largely because of his spirited opposition to the Bush administration's foreign policy in Iraq -- typically mentions Topic A at his campaign appearances?
"I said I was going to tone down my criticism of the president once the war began," Dean explained as he made his way from a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at the posh Sambuca restaurant to a private fundraiser for his presidential campaign. "I'm not gonna change my policy. I support the troops but I haven't changed my views on the policy."
Wearing a blue pinstripe suit, with a CBS Evening News crew clip-on microphone adjacent to an American flag lapel pin, Dean was then asked if the presumably antiwar crowd wouldn't enjoy hearing from a credible Democratic candidate who -- unlike his war-supporting Democratic rivals Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, or somewhat more nuanced, less gung-ho supporters like Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina -- had carved out a firm antiwar stance? Dean politely disagreed.
"Most of the people I know who are against the war don't want to talk about it anymore," Dean said. "They're too depressed and discouraged."
Another reporter then asked Dean if he was merely muffling his opposition to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" because President Bush enjoyed skyrocketing approval ratings, as did his war. He looked incredulous. "With these guys?" he asked, motioning back toward the room of moneyed, middle-aged matrons.
Dean was in the middle of a whirlwind week, including visits with the influential American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Building and Construction Trades Department's National Legislative Conference, and the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, a Democratic dinner in Atlanta, and a slew of fundraisers from New Rochelle and Bedford, N.Y., to Greenville, S.C., and on to Palm Beach and Miami, Fla. His Upper West Side appearances at two fundraisers for the DNC's Women's Leadership Forum -- one at Sambuca, and a more exclusive one across the street at the fabled Dakota -- were just dots on his itinerary.
Yet it seemed illustrative of the Democratic condition that Dean of all people would demur on the subject of the war -- and that the activist crowd would let him. Whether they're just looking forward to November 2004 when (hopefully) the war in Iraq will have come to a satisfactory conclusion -- or whether they are, as Dr. Dean characterized them, "depressed and discouraged" -- this is an odd time for Democrats.
It certainly doesn't recall the candidates of yore -- Sen. Gene McCarthy, D-Minn., whose opposition to the Vietnam War in 1968 propelled him to a near-defeat of incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary; or Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., whose grass-roots 1972 antiwar campaign actually garnered him the nomination. Which may, of course, be the point. After all, we don't talk much about McGovern anymore.
