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Agitators Half-Assed for Dean

Sunday, June 29th, 2003

If I lived in an early primary state, I’m fairly certain I’d register in the Democratic primary, and cast my lot for Howard Dean.

Yes, this is an excercize in strategic, single-issue voting. No, my leftward slide hasn’t intensified.

I find about 90% of Dean’s (vague) platform repulsive. But given that Bush is nearly a shoe-in — at least as things stand right now — and that there’s no one even remotely appealing among the rest of the Democrats, I’m intrigued by the prospect of a Dean-Bush matchup.

The most obvious reason, of course is the war. Dean is the only candidate in the field (or at least, the only candidate not in immediate need of psychiatric medication) who’d have the guts to challenge Bush directly on the war. Were Dean to win the primary, he’d have won it with a persistent, undiluted anti-war message, meaning he could go into the general election with an anti-war mandate from the people who nominated him. That means he’d be less likely to pussyfoot to the middle on the issue for fear of being labeled soft on defense.

Frankly, if it came down to Bush or Dean, I doubt I’d vote for either of them. But of the questions I have about the war, and of the Democrats available for the nomination, Dean I think is the candidate most likely to ask them.

That’s about as close as I get to an endorsement.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2003 at 5:19 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

12 Responses to “Agitators Half-Assed for Dean”

  1. #1 |  Aakash |  June 29th, 2003 at 6:03 pm

    The other day, I posted a comment (below) on Dean at this entry at Ben Domenech’s site.

    —-
    As I’ve said before, I think Bill Clinton had a horrific foreign policy. (Well, he was pretty bad with domestic policy as well.) It was hoped by many that Bush would have a better foreign policy, like the one he emphasized towards the latter part of his presidential campaign, in which he criticized the Clinton/Albright/neocon policies of internationalism, globalism, perpetual interventionism, and nation-building, and pledged that we will have a more humble policy in our dealings with the world, and would require a “higher threshold” before intervening overseas. Unfortunately, President Bush seems to be making a lot of the same mistakes as the administration before him. (Though, it has seemed that he has done this with some reluctance; with the intervention in Iraq, it seemed many times that he was having second thoughts about it, and was being pressured by the super-hawks; hopefully, he will be able to resist their pressure in the future.)

    Of course, as a conservative, and as a College Republican, I would not support a candidate like Dean. Though I disagree with some of the things that he has said with regards to war and foreign policy, he has raised some very good points about those issues as well. In one of his recent Polyconomics ‘Memos on the Margin’, conservative economist and GOP advisor Jude Wanniski wrote that Dr. Dean is “a serious candidate,” and has made sense in some of his campaign viewpoints and statements. Though I would disagree with Dean on most issues, I would have to agree that he is an impressive candidate, and has said made many valid points, and seems to be knowledgable and very intelligent. And we may be able to use more people with those qualities in our government.

    What do you think?
    –

  2. #2 |  sean crowley |  June 29th, 2003 at 11:17 pm

    The only question in a Dean candidacy is would he outpoll McGovern and carry a second state.

  3. #3 |  Nicholas Weininger |  June 30th, 2003 at 11:11 am

    I’m with you, Radley. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for the guy, but I’d like to see him get the nomination, so as to maximize the chance that some real debate about the war will accompany next year’s election. And the civil-unions thing indicates, albeit indirectly, that he might, just might, stand up in some way for civil liberties and against Ashcroftism. The only other candidates I can see doing that are the unelectable flakes.

  4. #4 |  mr. nobody |  June 30th, 2003 at 2:36 pm

    yeah, but maybe he brings back RENOSIM

  5. #5 |  mr. nobody |  June 30th, 2003 at 2:36 pm

    yeah, but maybe he brings back RENOISM

  6. #6 |  digamma |  July 1st, 2003 at 8:54 am

    Don’t forget Dean’s record on gun rights, Radley.

    I’m starting to think that the best government we can have right now is a leftist (i.e. left of Clinton) President and a Republican Congress. A leftist President would keep us out of wars and do an appropriate amount of European ass-kissing (which I don’t feel we should HAVE to do, but is still in our best interests). A Republican Congress would keep some kind of check on his/her domestic power.

  7. #7 |  Anonymous |  July 3rd, 2003 at 1:07 pm

    http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030702/ap_on_el_pr/dean_liberia_2

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