Howard Dean has now formally reneged on his December 15 pledge to premise U.S. foreign policy on U.N. permission. Now he’s saying: “We are not going to give the United Nations veto power over our foreign policy.” Better. He’s also clearly maneuvring to reverse himself on raising taxes on the middle class. Better still. I wonder if he believes he can really get away with this kind of trimming and positioning. Perhaps he has his base so sewn up he can afford to slither rightward. But at this rate, by November, he’ll be a supply-side unilateralist. And if he’s so web-savvy, why hasn’t he realized that the blogosphere has a memory? You can’t get away with anything any more.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Dean and his supporters identify viscerally with the foreign governments that resent being bullied by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Yet they identify barely at all with the largely voiceless people – in countries like Syria and Iran – who might consider a democracy’s projection of power into the heart of a region defined by tyranny to be progressive, even inspiring.” – from TNR’s endorsement of Joe Lieberman. The editorial is a strong one, and if I thought Lieberman was even faintly electable, Id’ say much the same. But the editorial’s main theme – about the decline of sensible moderation in Democratic ranks in the last three years – has a lacuna. The one man more responsible for destroying the Democratic centrist revival, for throwing away the Clinton legacy, and for suicidally pitching his party to the populist left was Al Gore, the man TNR endorsed last time around. Dean is merely picking up and re-energizing the pieces. Lieberman, alas, is one of those pieces.
ANOTHER CASE FOR DEAN: Jonathan Cohn tries to make sense of Dean’s apparent inconsistencies in a personal endorsement in The New Republic. It’s the sanest case for Dean I’ve yet read. If Dean can pivot rightward in the spring, and keep his base fired up, I still think he’s the most formidable candidate for the Dems.
The Dish 