Politics

Hmmm — seems like I need to get out of the house and go to some of the local Dean meet-ups at some point. Apparently, they’re the newest hot place to meet singles!

Though Wesley Clark may emerge as the boomer favorite among the Democratic presidential candidates, the hipster choice so far is Howard Dean. It’s not just his rolled-up sleeves or down-home oratory style; over the past three months, his events have developed a reputation as de facto singles mixers for young activists on the make.

Many of the events are set up through Meetup.com, a nonpolitical site that lets users arrange events. Most Dean meet-ups (nicknamed “meat-ups” by some) are in flirt-friendly locales like bars and restaurants. There are so many swinging supporters that they’ve formed a group, Singles for Dean, and the campaign recently launched Deanlink, where users post provocative photos alongside their political interests.

[…]

Straight women, meanwhile, have been spreading the word that Dean guys are passionate and cute. “I want to meet some nice, hunky, liberal-minded boys who aren’t apathetic losers living in their parents’ basements,” says Abigail Gullo, 30, an actress and teacher who has attended two meet-ups and a recent fund-raiser at Avalon. Dean guys, she says, are attractive, if not studly—kind of like the doctor himself. “It’s the dorky-glasses, slightly-thinning-hair-but-I’m-really-not-worried-about-it look. They’re hipsters who have given up the ironic T-shirts and are now in refined primary colors and button-down guayabera shirts. But they’re there! And that immediately puts them leaps and bounds ahead of any guy I’m going to meet on Match.com.”

(via Lane)

From an (admittedly wonderfully written, if one has the brain cells to read between the lines) article about a Wisconsin pro-Bush/anti-Dean rally:

Tom O’Day, chairman of the Republican Party of Dane County, offered a free copy of former Gov. Tommy Thompson’s book, “Power to the People,” and a button to the person who came up with the cleverest anti-Dean poster. The aroma of markers filled the bus, as the students searched aloud for words that rhyme with “Dean.”

[…]

…back on the bus driving through a cold rain, the students were both energized and weary. A good bit into the trip, O’Day stood and said it was time to choose a winner of the anti-Howard Dean poster contest.

“All in favor of, ‘Dean is a Ween, Don’t Bring it to My Bush’?”

No applause.

“Dean Can’t Measure Up, Four More Years”?

Mild applause.

“Dean’s a Queen, Vote Bush”?

Very mild applause.

“I think the queen’s got it,” O’Day said, delivering the Tommy Thompson book to the young woman in the back of the bus who created the poster. She would not reveal her name.

(via Joe Rospars)

Salon has a fascinating article by former counsel to President Nixon John W. Dean, who uses some little-known information about the Watergate scandal to advise Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame to file a civil suit in an attempt to break the current scandal wide open.

I thought I had seen political dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong. In blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame to take political revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth, Bush’s people have out-Nixoned Nixon’s people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs by any means.

[…]

[Nobody] I knew while working at the Nixon White House had the necessary viciousness, or depravity, to attack the wife of a perceived enemy by employing potentially life-threatening tactics.

So let me share a bit of history with Ambassador Wilson and his wife. And, well aware that gratuitous advice is rightfully suspect, let me also offer them a suggestion — drawn from some pages of Watergate history that till now I’ve only had occasion to discuss privately. Long before Congress became involved and a special prosecutor was appointed, Joe Califano, then general counsel to the Democratic National Committee and later a Cabinet officer, persuaded his Democratic colleagues to file a civil suit against the Nixon reelection committee. And that maneuver almost broke the Watergate coverup wide open. In seeking justice from the closed ranks of the Bush White House, Wilson and Plame should follow a similar strategy.

It’s a very interesting look back at Watergate, and forward to where things could go in the near future.

On a side note — does anyone know of a really good book (or books) about the Watergate scandal? While it wasn’t entirely “before my time”, I was extremely young when it happened, and I’d like to know a bit more about it. Recommendations are very welcome.

(via Mediaburn)

While I don’t live up north anymore, I know that about half my readership (mom, dad, Stacy, and Kirsten — yeah, that’s about half) still do. For those of you that might be interested in Dean, if you haven’t found this yet, it appears that there is an Alaskans for Dean Yahoo! group, as well as a Fairbanks for Dean Yahoo! group. Not to mention the Alaska for Dean site, though it’s pretty sparse, unfortunately.

(via Jonathan K-T)

It’s a little unclear, but it looks like Bob Graham is abandoning the Democratic nomination race.

Democrat Bob Graham told a Senate colleague Thursday that he would abandon his struggling presidential bid, a Democratic source said, but in a day filled with mixed signals, aides said he will continue to campaign.

One down…nine to go.

(via Atrios)

Very interesting tidbit in the midst of this MSNBC look at Democratic fundraising:

Taking the party-wide view, [Democratic fund-raiser Simon] Rosenberg pointed to what almost no one else has noticed: Based on the preliminary estimates for the third quarter, the 10-person Democratic field collectively will have outraised the Bush campaign, an indication of how fired up Democratic donors are.

“If Bush is this supposed fund-raising king, then this so-called ‘weak’ Democratic field — to use Karl Rove’s word — is outraising him,” Rosenberg said.

(via Mathew Gross)

I haven’t said much (anything) about the current scandal over the outed CIA operative, but this blew my mind. From an NPR interview between Robert Seigel and Nina Totenberg, as quoted by Atrios:

The White house asked for and got permission earlier this week to wait a day before issuing a directive to preserve all documents and logs which led one seasoned federal prosecutor to wonder why they wanted to wait a day, and who at the justice department told them they could do that, and why?

Why, indeed? Why in the world — in any potential scandal, especially one of this magnitude — would the guilty parties be given 24-hour notice so that they could clean out their e-mail inboxes, fire up the shredders, or do whatever else might need to be done to cover their tracks?

Wow. It looks like I owe the Dean campaign something of an apology. In my Dean/Clark post last Friday, I said this:

…his campaign’s current “5 million in 10 days” fundraising drive struck me as fairly ludicrous when I saw it (even with the fundraising skills they’ve demonstrated, that’s a lot of money in very little time, and if they don’t make their goal, then no matter how much money they do raise, it will be perceived as a “failure” because for the first time, Dean couldn’t meet or break a fundraising goal…they seem to be setting themselves up for bad press)…

While the bat graphic hasn’t been updated since sometime last night, it appears that they pulled it off. Joe Trippi posted a big thank you note last night, with the final count:

Our original goal for this quarter was \$7.6 million — to match what you accomplished last quarter. When we saw that we would surpass that goal we raised the bar to matching the record set by President Clinton. 10 days ago we had raised \$9.7 million and we set the goal of raising \$5 million dollars in just 10 days. You did that. Tonight we sit at \$14.8 million — \$5.1 million over 10 days.

That’s just incredible. Congratulations to the Dean campaign, and to everyone who chipped in to fill those bats. Good work.

Yesterday Dad asked for thoughts on possibilities of a Dean/Clark (or Clark/Dean) ticket. I deferred answering right away so that I could bounce it around in the back of my head for a bit.

Well, after letting it bounce around for the past day, I have to say that my only thought right now is that I haven’t got a clue. At this point, I really don’t know all that much about Wesley Clark. I know that he’s well respected by many people, which seems to cross party bounds, after having a strong military career. He apparently had strong ties to the Republican party in the past, and has recently crossed party lines to toss his hat in with the Democrats. It appears that his entrance into the Democratic nomination ring was predicated not so much by wishes of his own (at least at first), but by a grass-roots campaign from his supporters (and apparently he’s now looking to disband those grassroots weblogs, which may be a mistake, if he ticks off the very people that started giving momentum to his campaign before it ever even existed). Apparently during yesterday’s Democratic debate, he said nothing, but said it with style.

He delayed his entrance into the Democratic field until the last possible moment, playing a big “will he or won’t he?” game. That doesn’t seem like a good idea strategically — while there were some people on the ‘net tracking his every step, the major media didn’t bother with him until just a day or two before his official announcement, which gave a lot of press time to the other nine contenders. Delaying his entrance also limited the amount of time he could use to raise money.

Essentially, as I look at it all together, Clark worries me. At least to me, he’s coming off as wishy-washy. He couldn’t decide whether he was Republican or Democrat. He couldn’t decide to run or not. He doesn’t seem to care about the organizations that started his roll towards the nomination race. Most worrying to me is that while he may have had a good military career, he’s not been a player in political fields at all. He strikes me as someone who’d make a very good cabinet member or advisor to the President on military matters, but not someone I’d be terribly thrilled to be voting into office — and that may go for a vice-presidential position as well as a presidential position.

Dean may not be perfect — his campaign’s current “5 million in 10 days” fundraising drive struck me as fairly ludicrous when I saw it (even with the fundraising skills they’ve demonstrated, that’s a lot of money in very little time, and if they don’t make their goal, then no matter how much money they do raise, it will be perceived as a “failure” because for the first time, Dean couldn’t meet or break a fundraising goal…they seem to be setting themselves up for bad press) — but I still believe that he’s by far the best choice, and the only candidate that really gets me excited. As I’ve said before, should he fail to get the nomination, I’ll support whichever Democratic candidate does land it — we need to get Bush out of office, and that’s the bottom line — but none of the others have really struck me as someone I could support as strongly.

Actually, I should amend that. I have liked a lot of what I’ve seen and heard from Carol Mosely-Braun. Unfortunately, I have to concede that I don’t think there’s any way she’d get elected were she to land the nomination — America’s still not about to elect a black woman president, unfortunately. The reports of how chummy she and Dean have been at various points did toss a fun (if completely unfeasible) scenario into my head, though.

Suppose that there’s more to Clark than I’m seeing right now. Bush’s numbers continue to drop, and after Dean picks up the Democratic nomination, he does choose Clark as his VP. America, sick of Bush’s presidency, sees the combination of Dean’s platform and Clark’s military skills and elects them to the White House. Once they’re in, Dean appoints Mosely-Braun to a fairly high-ranking and visible position in his cabinet. Over the next four years, America visibly starts to crawl out of the hole that the Bush administration has dug for us — jobs come back, international relations start improving, etc. As 2008 approaches, it’s clear that we are in a far stronger position that we were in 2003, thanks to the Dean/Clark administration, and it becomes nigh-impossible for any Republican contender to have a realistic chance at getting back into the White House. Suddenly, Clark decides that politics isn’t for him after all, steps down from his VP position — and Dean announces Mosley-Braun as his VP for the 2008 election. He might take a bit of a hit in votes from the ~~more inbred~~ less forward-thinking voters, but if his first term had been strong enough, it might be enough for us to suddenly have a black female Vice President in 2008.

Okay, it’s a pipe dream. But I have to admit, it’s a pipe dream I like.