Deans interviewed on TV

Hey, look at the TV set...it turns out Howard Dean is married.

Tonight, Judith Steinberg Dean gave her first television interview to Diane Sawyer of ABC's "Primetime." I watched most of it -- though I kept checking into the Kansas basketball game on ESPN 2 (hopeless cause...a home loss to Richmond).

Of course, both of the Deans were present (and yes, ABC showed tape of the famous 1992 interview with Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton).

ABC played the "crazy" Dean "yeehaw" moment (ABC spells it Eyyahh!) from earlier in the week. And then they played it again...and I'm pretty sure they played it again. Was in three times in all?

Maybe they kept playing it because of something Dean said: "I've only seen it once. I've only seen it once."

The tape does make Dean seem over-the-top, but it was a campaign event among true believers. That would be more like a sporting event, I think, than a policy event. At sporting events, crazy screaming is the norm.

Thus, I would say who cares about Dean's tape, but his poll numbers have been dropping and something must explain it. Maybe it was the "war whoop," as Chris Matthews called it.

In a nutshell, I think there are multiple possible reasons: Kerry has some momentum from Iowa and he's also from a next-door state.

Dean has been pushing his strengths, but they are not so novel any more -- or were never all that important. For example, just about every major candidate is now anti-Bush on Iraq. Even the guys who voted for war (save Lieberman) And not many Democrats are going to vote for a candidate just to achieve a balanced budget.

Dean needs some good news.

I think it may be that the race won't be decided until March 2 when California, New York, and 8 other states (including Vermont, Maryland, Minnesota and Massachusetts) vote.

Update: Apparently, Edwards made some major errors in regard to the Defense of Marriage Act in tonight's debate. Chris Matthews implied that it was intentional spin to try to play multiple sides of the issue.

Oops: From Dean's Outspoken Past

As I learned by reading Pandagon last night, today's New York Times has a story to follow by Jodi Wilgoren and Rachel Swarns, headlined "Tape Shows Dean Maligning Iowa Caucuses." This seems like bad news for Dean, primarily because he insults the Iowa political process -- even as he's gone around praising its democratic qualities. Many people might not care about these old statements (and some would agree with him), but the people who attend caucuses are likely to be the most offended. And since this is on TV (with images), there is perhaps greater potential for impact:

Four years ago, Howard Dean denounced the Iowa caucuses as "dominated by special interests," saying on a Canadian television show that they "don't represent the centrist tendencies of the American people, they represent the extremes."

Videotapes of the show were broadcast on the NBC Nightly News on Thursday, less than two weeks before the Jan. 19 caucuses, the first contest of the Democratic nominating race. The tapes show Dr. Dean arguing that the lengthy caucus process in which neighbors gather to debate their preferences is inconvenient for ordinary people.

"Say I'm a guy who's got to work for a living, and I've got kids," he said on the show on Jan. 15, 2000. "On a Saturday, is it easy for me to go cast a ballot and spend 15 minutes doing it, or do I have to sit in a caucus for eight hours?"

A moment later, he added, "I can't stand there and listen to everyone else's opinion for eight hours about how to fix the world."`

The story also quotes Dean saying in 2000 that Bush was a moderate who might win re-election. Lots of people might have thought the former in 2000 and have now reconsidered their view. That's not a big deal. And Dean certainly isn't in favor of Bush's re-election now. Indeed, the Democrats need to reach out to people who thought Bush was a moderate and viewed him as electable.

Perhaps more troubling for the candidate, Dean is also quoted saying that Hamas might become the post-Arafat Palestinian leadership. He said this would be bad, of course, because Hamas is a terrorist organization. But, Dean added that it might also have good effects, forcing Hamas to act more responsibly and negotiate.

Dean has already had to deal with Israel issues on his campaign, and I've blogged a little about the controversial views of some of his advisors. Again, I don't think this part of the story matters that much in Iowa or New Hampshire. The opinions are not totally unreasonable and can be explained as part of a bigger context.

Finally, the story includes the accusation that Dean is bringing in thousands of out-of-state volunteers and some of these people will allegedly attempt to participate (illegally) in the Iowa caucuses. This is little more than political mud-slinging and could actually end up hurting whatever opponents are levying the charges.

The winner? In my mind, it is Clark, who has just passed Kerry in New Hampshire tracking polls and is behind Dean only 24-20% in a national poll. Mark A.R. Kleiman has been tracking the Clark campaign, and its recent surge, pretty closely.

Oh, and since I'm writing about the election, Liberal Oasis has an ad that didn't make MoveOn's final cut...actually, it's a satire of the other ads. Thanks to Dave Johnson for the link.

Update: I just read Daily Kos, who reports that Senator Tom Harkin's endorsement of Dean has changed today's TV news coverage. MSNBC apparently went from stories focusing on Dean's old statements to this latest political victory.

Foreign Policy views of Democratic Candidates for President

Boston.com has a story by Anne E. Kornblut that appears in today's Boston Globe, , "On the world front, candidate differences are matters of degree." It discusses the foreign policy views of the various Democratic presidential candidates.

Here's the meat of the article:

"They're all calling from the same area code," said James M. Lindsey, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "There may be some differences, but there is a fair amount of similarity -- not in terms of Iraq, because there are real differences there. But in terms of the general view of America's role in the world, how you deploy American power, the rule of law, all these candidates share the same general outlook."

If there is a spectrum, he said, it reaches from Dennis Kucinich on the liberal end to Joseph I. Lieberman on the more conservative one, but "they're all pretty much in the same general intellectual place."

Although they differ in the details, the top-tier candidates would engage in talks with North Korea and would allow for some sort of incentive package to encourage Pyongyang to dismantle its weapons programs; would restart the Middle East peace talks; would work more closely with the United Nations and Europe, including relying on weapons inspectors when necessary; would take a more skeptical approach with Russia, because of crackdowns on rights in Chechnya.

The most obvious foreign policy differences within the Democratic Party are in two arenas: whether to accelerate free trade with other nations and how to handle the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Other questions, such as precisely how to enter talks with North Korea, are more nuanced.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, for instance, has said he would engage North Korea's leadership directly, rather than in a group setting with four other nations, as Bush has done. He would also deliver economic incentives as part of a "nonagression pact" with Pyongyang in exchange for cessation of the nuclear weapons program.

Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts promises to "engage Iran and renew bilateral negotiations with North Korea on the nuclear issue," a direct assault on Bush's far more distant approach.

On Cuba, the line pits one group of Democrats opposing an embargo -- retired general Wesley K. Clark, Kerry, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri -- against Lieberman of Connecticut and, of course, President Bush, who opposes any trade with Cuba under the current government.

Kornblut points out that trade is perhaps the most divisive issue. Some of the candidates, like Gephardt (and Kucinich), have taken strong stands against "free trade" as practiced in NAFTA and the WTO. Meanwhile, Lieberman embraces these same deals, as do Clark and Kerry (who would add labor and environment standards). Dean takes a similar view, though he's tilting more to unions now than he did as Vermont governor.

Kornblut claims that several of the candidates have asserted that the US should retain the option of launching preemptive attacks -- but with the standard caveat that an attack on the US is imminent. This is an improtant point distinguishing this group from Bush.

Before making too much of this, Steve Walt of Harvard has an important point to keep in mind:

"We have to be a little bit careful trying to read anybody's worldview from where they are in the campaign," said Steve Walt, a professor at Harvard's Belfer Center for International Affairs. "If you went back and looked at what George Bush and his whole team said in 2000, you'd get some things right -- but you'd get a lot of things really wrong. One theme of his campaign was nation-building is really terrible. We wake up three years later, and we're doing it several places."

Still, I'm pretty sure that neither Dean nor Clark will shift gears as dramatically as Bush has.

Dean's Advisors: Who is Clyde Prestowitz?

Previously, I noted that Clyde Prestowitz is a foreign policy advisor to Howard Dean.

Recently, Prestowitz published Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (Basic Books, 2003), which is apparently a through critique of George W. Bush's foreign policy. Lance Knobel of Davos Newbies plugged the book a couple of weeks ago as "the most powerful indictment I've seen of the Bush foreign policy. What makes it particularly potent for me is that it comes from someone who should, on past form, be a friend of the administration."

Prestowitz has criticized Bush's approach to the post 9/11 terror problem, Kyoto, free trade, the ICC, land mine ban, etc.

Here's the oddity: Prestowitz served in the Reagan administration Commerce Department and considers himself a conservative. Actually, this former foreign service member considers himself a product of a "middle-class, conservative, super-patriotic, Republican, Born Again Christian family."

That quote comes from a very interesting transcript of Prestowitz speaking as part of the Carnegie Council's "Books for Breakfast" program.

Here's what he had to say about the US media "filter."

One, the elite American press -- The Washington Post and The New York Times -- is pretty good. But one of the negative aspects of the media in the U.S. is that you travel through this big country and pick up the local newspaper and you read it in thirty seconds. There is a huge vacuum of information out there in much of the heartland.

Secondly, all the major hotels in the world have CNN, BBC, many of them have one of the French channels, many of them are now carrying Al Jazeera, Fox is increasingly there. During the Jenin incident in Palestinem I happened to be in Malaysia, so I was able to get Fox, CNN, BBC, France, Germany, and Al Jazeera. I watched the same incident on all the different channels.

If you look at CNN and Fox and then you switch to BBC, there is more similarity between CNN and Fox than between either of them and BBC. Looking at that through BBC, if it didn’t have the word “Jenin,” you would have thought it was another place. And on Al Jazeera, it looks like a different world.

CNN is a reputable, hard-working news organization; they try to do their best to show you the facts as they see it, and the same of BBC. But what I am seeing is a cultural prism. The American audiences are seeing this through a pre-selected set of presumptions. So they never see what the BBC audience sees. That means that even our elite policymakers are getting a somewhat distorted view.

Prestowitz sounds quite interesting and the interview is worth a quick read. He apparently abandoned the Republican party some time ago, however, as he voted for Clinton in 1992.

Note: I posted a slightly different version of this to DailyKos, if anyone wants to add comments.

Update: Based on the comments I already received, Prestowitz is controversial because the Jewish community (and Joe Lieberman) disagree with his proposed policies towards Israel. Dean took some heat for similar remarks some time ago, so I don't think it's the kind of stuff that can stick.

Prestowitz is also known as a Japan trade hawk, so this might make him appealing to the anti-globalization crowd.

Dean's Foreign Policy Views

Sorry I haven't yet blogged about Dean's foreign policy address, as promised.

On the flight earlier this week, I did find time to read it. Overall, it's good and not especially radical. Most importantly for Dean's campaign, he framed his Iraq critique around issues that will assuredly resonate with his voters without much chance of unpredictable events throwing his campaign for a loop.

The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show that the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at unbelievable cost. An administration prepared to work with others in true partnership might have been able, if it found no alternative to Saddam's ouster, to then rebuild Iraq with far less cost and risk....

Empowered by the American people, I will work to restore:

The legitimacy that comes from the rule of law;

The credibility that comes from telling the truth;

The knowledge that comes from first-rate intelligence, undiluted by ideology;

The strength that comes from robust alliances and vigorous diplomacy;

And, of course, I will call on the most powerful armed forces the world has ever known to ensure the security of this nation.

That's a solid critique, and somewhat similar to the one offered by Wesley Clark.

Later in the speech, Dean used a telling phrase that might just catch on as a counter to the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing." Dean prefers "coalitions of the able," which includes NATO and Asian alliance partners.

Dean also calls for a new "global alliance to defeat terror," which is apparently like the "war on terror," but with closer connections to other states. The globalization of America's foreign policy would begin with Iraq:

To succeed we also need urgently to remove the label "made in America" from the Iraqi transition. We need to make the reconstruction a truly international project, one that integrates NATO, the United Nations, and other members of the international community, and that reduces the burden on America and our troops.

A fair amount of attention was devoted to discussing genuine terror threats that receive too little attention post 9/11, such as the problem of "loose nukes" (and other WMD materials) from the former Soviet Union. Dean calls for expanding the Nunn-Lugar program, for example.

As I said, in all, it's a solid speech, focusing on genuine high priority concerns, but based on multilateral principles. Indeed, process explains a great deal of the difference dividing Democrats from the Bush administration on foreign policy.

Democrats like Dean and Clark agree that terrorism and WMD are high priority threats, but they do not think the US should consider using force without compliance with global norms. They prefer sharing burdens, building strong coalitions with all the key allies, and addressing a variety of terror threats (not merely those emanating from rogue states).


Note: Larry Solum links to an article coauthored by my friend Avery Kolers, "Towards a Pluralist Account of Parenthood" (published in Bioethics, apparently).

Dean's Foreign Policy Team

The Howard Dean campaign has released additional information about its foreign policy team -- and policy aims. A couple of days ago, Dan Drezner blogged about the team and then he blogged about Dean's major foreign policy address. Unfortunately, I only have time today to discuss the team. Consider this a followup to my earlier comment about Danny Sebright.

Later, I promise to take up the speech.

Dean's website has the list of new advisors (and it mentions Sebright and a couple of other longer-term people).

Overall, it's not an especially radical team, though there are several controversial figures. Dan Drezner pointed out that Warren Christopher was standing next to Dean when some important recent foreign policy announcements were made, but given his work in Florida 2000, it's not surprising that Christopher doesn't appear on this list.

Here's my brief rundown:

Ben Barber is a Professor at Maryland (disclosure: I obtained my PhD from Maryland). Barber is a longtime advocate of "strong democracy," which basically means he wants much more deliberation about public policy issues and much more democracy in global politics. This is an interesting choice for Dean. Barber wrote Jihad vs. McWorld, a book that managed to criticize both ethnic nationalism and economic globalization as threats to democracy.

Ash Carter is a longtime defense policy wonk. I first read his work back in the 1980s when I too wanted to be a defense policy wonk. He worries a lot about problems like missile defense.

Ivo Daalder is a Brookings fellow and another Clinton-era guy (everyone I mentioned so far worked for the Clinton administration). Whenever I read his work, it seems solid and mainstream.

Morton Halperin has been around a long time. He coauthored a famous book on arms control with Thomas Schelling (that basically says we should embrace deterrence as arms control and plan weapons choices accordingly). His phones were famously bugged by Kissinger/Nixon and he's been left-of-center for decades. He's most lately been a multilateralist writing for the American Prospect.

Elisa Harris is a WMD proliferation specialist. Her work is quite solid.

Tony Lake was Clinton's National Security Advisor. To many, he personifies the Democratic Party's foreign policy establishment. Note: Kissinger tapped Lake's phones too (someone leaked the secret bombings in Cambodia and Kissinger suspected his aides). Question: What has happened to the political landscape?

Clyde Prestowitz scares some people. Anyone who has authored something called "Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism..." is going to have that effect on those wedded to the status quo. Disclosure: I once wrote an op-ed called "Is an Outlaw State Calling the Shots?" (warning: pdf file). It was written in December 2000, prior to Bush's ascendance to power.

Susan Rice has been first consulting and then writing for Brookings since leaving the Clinton administration. She is an Africa specialist.

Jeffrey Sachs. Best known for his work "helping" Russia, Poland and other European nations make transitions from state socialism. Janine Wedel offered a fairly strong critique of his efforts, as I've noted previously.

Admiral Stansfield Turner is a former CIA Director and has lately been very worried about WMD proliferation.

Also named: Franklin Kramer, General Joseph Hoar, Major General Randy Jayne, General Merrill McPeak and William Woodward. I don't know of them -- or do not recall offhand. I'll try to update when I learn more.

Howard Dean and the Progressives

On December 9, Ruy Teixeira posed an odd question: "Can Dean Move to the Center?" He cites polling data showing that Dean is most popular with the most left-leaning Democrats, and his popularity declines among centrists and conservatives in the party.

Teixeira seems to be anticipating the general election as many people are wondering if Dean is McGovern 1972 or Mondale 1984. For example, Matthew Yglesias links to a Washington Post article that notes Bush intends to paint Dean...surprise...as someone too liberal to be president!

Pssst, everyone, isn't Dean basically a centrist? Certainly more a centrist than either Bush or the more left-leaning Democrats who vote in the primaries.

Yesterday, Lean Left posted a link to the 2004 presidential candidate selector. It's a short quiz that asks for simple responses to a number of important policy questions and then, after a click, the website produces a list of candidates who most closely approximate your selections.

I've taken their test many times over the past year and several of the top Democrats usually score around 80 to 85% for me. Several of my friends report similar results.

Over the year, as I have re-taken the test, Dean has gone up, Kerry has gone down, and Clark has emerged out of nowhere. Kucinich has usually been my top or sometimes second choice (after their "ideal theoretical candidate," who unsurprisingly scores 100% for everyone). Bush barely registers, which apparently means I'm not a Bush Republican.

Surprise, again!

Anyway, there are a lot of good reasons why Dean is more a centrist than someone "too liberal to be president." This is true even if he does have some progressive leanings: his re-regulation plan, anti-Iraq war, gay civil unions, etc.

One of Dean's major issues is balancing the budget. Do radical leftists worry about balancing the budget, or about the state absorbing too much of the economy's borrowing? For literally decades, Republicans bashed Democrats because they wanted to spend on social welfare. During the 1970s and 1980s, this meant deficits-be-damned.

In an odd twist, it's now the Bush people who seem to embrace deficits-be-damned.

Progressives have gone for Dean, I suspect, because he spoke out early and loudly against the Iraq war, organized actively on the internet by tapping into progressive venues, and appears ready for a bloody campaign against Bush.

In short, progressives want their candidate personally able to assume the "war room" tasks taken by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos in the '92 Clinton campaign. Those guys ran a media operation that directly challenged every distortion emerging from the '92 Bush I campaign.

They matched fax-for-fax.

From all this, I suspect progressives want to win really badly, and except for the tiny majority that register support for Dennis Kucinich in the polls, are willing to sacrifice on a few issues to assure the overall goal.

That's all good, and hopefully means even the Greens will draw the same conclusion.

I bought a Howard Dean political button at the Kentucky state fair back in August, but have not yet worn it. It's getting more tempting though.

Who has Dean's ear?

On November 21, after reading a little bit about Howard Dean's plan to re-regulate some industries, I speculated that Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz might be behind them. After all, Stiglitz has just authored a book proposing much the same thing. The economist defends regulation as a measure to make up for information gaps in the economy.

Anyway, it now seems clear that I was right.

The Washington Post is reporting that Stiglitz is advising the Dean campaign.

The article also mentions some other people who are advising Dean. Since the former Vermont Governor has received more attention for his criticism of the Iraq War, and since I follow international politics, I was particularly interested in his foreign policy team.

It turns out that Dean's main foreign policy person is a volunteer he met after giving a speech for the DNC: Danny E. Sebright, who is Associate Vice President for the Cohen Group. It seems to be some sort of policy consulting shop, headed by former Defense Secretary William Cohen (who was once a Republican Senator).

It looks like Sebright started at DIA, and then spent about a decade as a civilian in the Pentagon, working on various issues including the Middle East Peace Process, arms sales, counter-proliferation, and most recently the anti-terror campaign. He took a mid-career MPA from Harvard's Kennedy School too. His BA is 1984 (George Washington), so I guess he's roughly my age ('83 Kansas).

In short, this doesn't look like the resume of an anti-establishment progressive peacenik. Indeed, in an interview with the Boston Globe, Sebright said he hooked up with the Dean campaign for reasons that sound an awful lot like the kinds of things Wes Clark is saying: the anti-terror war would be more effective with engaged allies.

Sebright says that he initially tried to convince Dean to tilt the other way on Iraq and argued that Bush shouldn't have to reveal detailed evidence about chemical and biological weapons.

How can I get a likely presidential candidate's ear?

I'd have a slightly different message.

Howard Dean and the Progressive Agenda

I haven't said much about Howard Dean lately, so let me touch on a couple of news items that caught my attention.

First, everyone presumably knows about the confederate flag flap triggered by Dean's comments during a debate. People also know about his partial retraction, presumably.

But do they know about the repair measures he's pursued? For example, Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is expected to endorse Dean in the next few days. In a recent interview with the Baltimore Sun, Cummings called Dean "somebody who can energize our base" and "the kind of candidate we need to run for president."

I'm not certain how much these kinds of endorsements make, but politicians obviously think they are valuable. Cummings, by chance, is coming to my University to speak in the near future and I hope to learn more about his views on Dean. I'll blog about it I learn anything valuable.

Second, Dean announced this past week that he intends to re-regulate various industries in an attempt to ward off Enron-style corporate abuses and to prevent further media concentration. Libertarians, predictably, are up in arms about this even though many would agree that corporate abuses need to be addressed.

The libertarian line isn't all that far from the Democratic Leadership Council's , which wants to find market-based ways to overcome corporate abuses.

Is the answer to market failure even more markets? Perhaps, but what is the answer? Even the libertarian writer Megan McArdle, discussing Dean's plan, acknowledges that the answer is quite evasive. After all, she "would be surprised indeed to find that he has solved a problem that is still worrying some of the finest minds in finance and economics."

Perhaps the answer is targeted regulation. It does seem like a good idea to prevent too much concentration of media power. Utility de-regulation did have some horrible consequences as Enron and the California energy disaster (which are related problems) demonstrated -- not to mention WorldCom. Plus, unregulated stock options are a big problem that helped promote the bubble economy of the late 1990s.

Dean's fellow Democrats (like Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman) blasted him right away without allowing much time for real discussion of his plan. Indeed, Clark has said at times that he was motivated to run in part by Enron and problems he had observed first-hand in investment banking.

After reading just a small bit about Dean's plans, I wonder if Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz is behind them? Last year's anti-globalization book has been following by this year's The Roaring Nineties that debunks many myths about the 1990s' economy. He slams telecom deregulation, apparently. The American Prospect's book reviewer summarizes a key Stiglitz claim:

He shared a 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for his pathbreaking contributions to the concept that markets function imperfectly, hurting many people, because the information available to market participants is inadequate. So government has to intervene, adroitly through rules and regulations, to make markets function properly.

Stiglitz, unlike Dean, doesn't seem to be such a stickler for deficit reduction, so maybe I'm seeing something that doesn't exist. Obviously, I'd be right if Stiglitz (with cause) joined the Economists for Dean That website, by the way, has been giving a lot of play to the mutual fund scandal, which also fits into this picture (as Paul Krugman readers know).

Alert to my friends supporting Kucinich, Braun or Sharpton: this is a progressive and populist idea Dean is pursuing. It's worth examining in more detail.

For that reason, I wouldn't mind reading Brad DeLong's take on Dean's plans. Brad?

America's next President?

The US presidential election is still 14 months away. However, the past week has been quite interesting for those who follow politics closely. I've already been talking about some of the incumbent's problems, so let me turn today to the Democrats.

I'm not sure which of these developments will turn out to be the most important in the long haul, but let me mention two.

First, John Edwards of North Carolina announced that he will not seek re-election in the Senate. To many observers, this probably seems totally irrational. After all, Joe Lieberman sought to retain his seat in 2000, why wouldn't Edwards do the same as a hedge against a failed national campaign? According to the AP, North Carolina election law would allow Edwards to pursue both elected positions simultaneously.

I'm guessing Edwards is trying to signal a very strong commitment to the national election. Even if he's really running for Vice President, this allows him to devote complete attention to the task. As I argue below, he's going to have to work hard, because I think the odds are against him becoming the presidential nominee.

Still, I think Edwards's prospects for a space on the national ticket are going to look much better than they do now by next February. If Howard Dean holds his lead in the latest Iowa polls, Richard Gephardt has basically already said he'll quit the race. Gephardt won Iowa in 1988 and has to win that midwestern state's caucuses.

Then, if Dean wins New Hampshire, John Kerry is in big trouble and Joe Lieberman could be too.

So, by January 30, the Democratic field might be down to Dean, Edwards, Bob Graham, Carol Moseley-Braun, Al Sharpton, and Dennis Kucinich. On February 3, these states have primaries or caucuses: Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico (the only caucuses on this date), Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

A moderate is going to do well in Missouri, Oklahoma and South Carolina -- and could even win all 3 of those states.

Much could still change by early February -- for example Wesley Clark could be the one winning those states. Or Lieberman might still be in the race, but I frankly doubt he's going to do very well. That means either Graham or Edwards stand a good chance of winning some of these states.

On February 10, Tennessee and Virginia also vote in primaries. So that means Edwards might have 5 primary victories going into Super Tuesday (March 2).

However, I predict that Dean (or perhaps Kerry if the Doc stumbles between now and Iowa/New Hampshire) will virtually seal up the nomination on that date with wins in New York, California, Massachusetts, Maryland, etc.

Second, there are rumors flying around that Dean met with Clark recently to ask for his support -- and perhaps to explore the possibility of Clark taking a Vice Presidential position on a Dean ticket.

It is really way too early to speculate about this kind of stuff, but it's my blog so I'm going to do it anyway.

Clark would almost perfectly balance Dean and offer genuine foreign policy credibility. He would do for Dean what Republicans believed Cheney did for Bush in 2000. Clark has been a genuine critic of Bush foreign policy, but he's apparently a classic multilateralist who can imagine legitimate uses of force. In short, he's like Kerry, only a recently retired General who has been on CNN a lot and is from Arkansas...and was a Rhodes Scholar.

Repeat: We're talking about a smart guy who won the war over Kosovo with zero US soldier deaths, with a regular gig on CNN and a direct connect to the south?

B-I-N-G-O. We have a bingo!

Edwards is a likable southerner who could help balance a Dean ticket, but Clark seems like a much better choice. The Democrats really need to win a couple of border states like West Virginia and Arkansas. Dean's "state's rights" position on guns, combined with Clark, might just be enough to do it.

I guess that makes John Edwards a Cabinet member, January 2005. Attorney General maybe?

Update 9/17/03

daily KOS links these 2 stories. The blogger argues that Clark may well virtually ignore Iowa and New Hampshire, hoping to emerge as the "anti-Dean" in the South Carolina and Oklahoma primaries. Clark may even have timed his announcement this week to steal thunder from Edwards, who announced 9/16/03. Edwards, as I argue above, is also positioning to be the early anti-Dean.