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Just 333 Days Left: The Frontrunner

By Mark Grueter

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MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, often sneered at by the high-minded for being glib, is nevertheless the best political talk show around. Live from Harvard University this past Monday night, Howard Dean was on with Matthews for one hour. The Democratic frontrunner was asked about how he would deal with the nuclear threat that Iran poses, and this was his response:

The key, I believe, to Iran is pressure through the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is supplying much of the equipment that Iran, I believe, most likely is using to set itself along the path of developing nuclear weapons. We need to use that leverage with the Soviet Union and it may require us to buying [sic] the equipment the Soviet Union was ultimately going to sell to Iran to prevent Iran from them [sic] developing nuclear weapons.

Even forgiving the fact that the Soviet Union hasn’t existed for over a decade, the argument makes no sense. Iran already has the technology and the equipment and that’s the problem. Dean’s answer is, of course, nothing more than something that had been stuffed into his head at one point or another by an adviser and was now just sort of oozing out of his skull indiscriminately. But this should still be cause for concern. For example, what would “Russia” (as other people call it) think of Dean’s apparent desire to “pressure” them? And what kind of “leverage” do we have with the "Soviets" anyway? All that was lost after 9/11.

Toward the end of the interview, Dean took a question from an astute, unidentified male member of the audience:

To follow up on what Chris mentioned before, after your Vietnam deferment, you went skiing in Aspen. And just looking back at your career in general, what have you done specifically that gives us confidence you are well-versed in national security and foreign policy, just one instance in which you have worked in that area?

Dean had back problems as a youngster, so he eagerly brought his medical records to the draft officers during the war in Vietnam with the hopes of being deferred, and his wishes were granted. He admits to this and claims that skiing, for whatever reason, didn’t aggravate his back. But the question posed here is crucial. The frontrunner’s answer:

Oh, well, I’ll give you one right now. I just met with Ash Carter, who has agreed to be a senior adviser for us, who is a professor here at the Kennedy School and is a former assistant secretary of defense. We have a pretty good security team. I have spent time in over 50 countries during my lifetime, some of them as governor, some of them as not. And so I would say that I have at least as much foreign policy experience as George Bush, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter did before-or Bill Clinton did-before they became President. I was chairman of the National Governors Association, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

That last line was added rather irrelevantly, but that is the Dean method. He has been criticized as being too “angry” and as having an uncontrollable temper, but this is a red herring. His real weakness is that he is overly defensive in fumbling over practically every question put to him. Dean is insecure, jumpy and garrulous. Take a good look at his responses and then think about the last time we elected a nervous man with no foreign policy experience. We were assured the same thing with Bush: "Well, I have great advisers, like Colin Powell - they’ll tell me what to do," and all the rest of it. Obviously, that strategy doesn’t work - we need leadership and sagacity in the President himself, that is what this election should be about. At any rate, how dare we go down that precarious road again. Do we not need someone in the Oval Office with credentials, now more than ever? Besides, Dean’s team, as he concedes, is only “pretty good.”

Earlier, Matthews asked the candidate where, if captured, the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein should be tried: in The Hague, the World Court or in the United States. Dean said that he doesn’t care (“You know, the truth is it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me as long as he (Bin Laden) is brought to justice. I think that’s the critical part of that”). So, he evidently doesn’t understand the significance of where a trial is held; the concern over the legitimacy of a trial and how other countries will view it. And he fails to appreciate international law. This is troubling, especially coming from a man who receives so much support from the Left.

Surprisingly, Matthews asked Dean if he believed in the idea of American “exceptionalism,” or the notion that America is somehow different from all other countries; that it is a unique historical phenomenon, and that, perhaps because of this special existence, it is required to set an example for everyone else and play a ubiquitous role in the world. I had a professor at the New School that spent an entire semester showing persuasively, in excruciating detail, that while America seems exceptional, it certainly isn’t. Dean, however, answered the question in the affirmative:

I think this is the country where there is less cynicism and more hope than there are-than there is in most other countries. And I think that’s the great tragedy of the Bush administration, is, (sic) we’re losing our ability to have hope and to believe that any problem can be overcome, if you are willing to work hard enough. That is something that really is a beacon to the rest of the world. And if we lose that, the world has lost a true leader.

Does anyone really believe that in four years, Bush has single-handedly crushed the American dream? This dream has always been just that anyway - a fantasy, a concoction. Dean is wrong twice. In addition to all of the naivete and blather about playing by the rules and working hard, he demonstrates no understanding of the concept of exceptionalism. Why didn’t he just ask Matthews for a clarification? It’s kind of a fuzzy concept, so why not ask the interrogator to be more exact about what he means before endeavoring to spit out something foolish? This is the Dean method though - don’t think, just get the jaw moving. However, one has to admit that it has somehow worked well for him thus far.

Dean showed signs of cowardice as well. Matthews got him to agree with the idea that “giant media corporations” should be “broken up” because, as Dean himself argued, “11 companies control 90% of the information.” But then Matthews asked Dean specifically which companies should be broken up - Fox, GE, who? Dean was evasive, to say the best: “I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not.” He affected to like the theory of “breaking up” all those evil media conglomerates, but when it came down to specifics, he balked.

One wonders, despite all of his swagger and yelling on the stump, if this guy knows what the hell he’s talking about. What seems crystal clear is that the man is no different than any other politician, which says nothing in itself except for the fact that he’s managed to dupe millions into believing that he’s some sort of populist outsider. Asked about why he refused to abide by campaign spending limits, despite his word that he would and despite his calls for campaign finance reform, Dean boasted:

We planned the — look, our campaign is campaign finance reform. We raised three times as much money as everybody else in the last quarter, average donation, $77 from 200,000 people. That is campaign finance reform.

Well, that’s not the point. And George W. Bush used the exact same phony argument, with very similar numbers, during the 2000 campaign. And I could go on and on.

But I have to admit that I like the guy personally, much more so anyway than all the others (save Wesley Clark) and I really do believe that voters vote primarily based on personality.  But one has to draw the line somewhere. Dean claims that George Washington is one of his two “heroes,” largely because our first President refused to serve a third term. But Washington, as only history knows, was an inept military commander, a lying, back-stabbing political opportunist, and, for good measure, mostly illiterate. His alleged selfless act of refusing to serve a third term belongs to the realm of myth. Calling him your hero is almost as bad as saying that Jesus Christ is your favorite philosopher.

I’ve never had a high estimate of Democratic voters (all of my aunts and uncles notwithstanding), so I grimly suspect that Dean will become the nominee. But he will lose, badly, sort of like when Nixon took 49 states from McGovern. The Republicans will get the last laugh because the Dems failed to see what was directly in front of their faces: Wesley Clark, who is on Hardball next Monday, by the way. I hope the thick-headed Dean supporters tune in, not because I expect any of them to change their minds, but just so that they can witness what might have been if Dean does indeed win the nomination.

Click here for Grueter's previous column.

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Mark Grueter is pursuing a Masters in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty for Political and Social Sciences. He is the Publications Manager and Web Editor for The Canon, the school's student publication and is a contributor to Stop Smiling, a magazine based in Chicago. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.  Grueter may be contacted at [email protected].

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