Salon’s Joan Walsh sounds somewhat despairing; millionaire socialist Katrina Vanden Heuvel puts the boot in for the Left; and this quote on ABC’s The Note (from a senior Democratic operative) is priceless:
I have read the accounts of the Clark interviews and my reaction is despair and anger. Why did my party’s best operatives think it would be a good idea to subject their neophyte candidate to the country’s savviest reporters for over an hour? Why have my party’s elders rallied around a candidate who is so shockingly uninformed about core issues and his own positions? I am not a Dean supporter – but I am angry that our party’s leaders have anointed an alternative to him who seems even more ignorant and unprepared – and that this supposed ‘anti-war’ candidate turns out to have been in favor of both the war resolution and Richard Nixon!! And let’s not even talk about the Clintons. Today I am embarrassed to be a Democrat.
The flip-flop on perhaps the most important political question for the Democratic field – where he would have stood on the Iraq War resolution – was and is pathetic. More pathetic, however, is the notion that the Dems really did think of this guy as their savior. Are they that weak on national security issues that a general – even as hapless as this one – is their only chance? What does that say about their own self-image? I’m beginning to think that Dean and Gephardt could be the real survivors here. But Dean has just had the worst of the Republican judgments about his electability confirmed by his own party establishment. That must hurt a little, no?
MARK, PROPHET: “Correction, Sept. 17, 2003: This article originally stated that Mark’s Gospel was written around 70 B.C.E. It was written around A.D. 70.” – Slate.
The Dish 