The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes sees how fiscal issues can hurt Bush:
Normally, a liberal Democrat who claims to be a fiscal conservative would pose no danger to a conservative Republican. But Bush’s spending record is so awful (non-military expenditures up 8.7 percent in 2003) that Dean, for one, might make headway on the issue. After all, his fiscal record as Vermont governor wasn’t all that bad. At the least, he could use the spending issue to take the edge off his liberalism and embarrass Bush. And no doubt former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, his new book in hand, will travel the country, arguing that deficit reduction spawned the late 1990s boom.
I think we’ll see a newly centrist Dean by the spring. If Bush goes hard to the right on social issues, it could get very close.
The Dish 