December 8, 2003

Governor, You're No George McGovern

Why Howard Dean might be the next Bill Clinton

Jonathan Rauch

Howard Dean—the former Vermont governor who is leading

the Democratic presidential pack—is a suicide pill,

too left-wing to win. Or so goes the conventional

wisdom. "Unless he changes course dramatically, Dr.

Dean looks the wrong man for the Democrats," says The

Economist. Many observers liken Dean to George

McGovern, who steered the party off a cliff in 1972.

In fact, George McGovern likens Dean to George

McGovern. "In the candidacy of Howard Dean," reported

The New York Times last month, McGovern "hears echoes

of his own."

Don't bet on it. I spent several days recently poring

over Dean's speeches and other public comments. The

conclusion was not as expected. The Dean campaign may

be set to the music of firebrand liberalism, but its

words belie the notion that Dean has painted himself

into a far-left corner. Even on Iraq—his signature

issue—Dean has planted himself subtly but distinctly

to the right of his supporters.

Dean's faithful believe the war was wrong, wrong,

wrong. Dean seems to agree. "Had I been a member of

the Senate," he said in a speech in February, "I would

have voted against the resolution that authorized the

president to use unilateral force against Iraq—unlike

others in that body now seeking the presidency." In

late November, he ran an ad saying, "I opposed the war

in Iraq, and I'm against spending another $87 billion

there."

High-octane stuff; but Dean has been more cautious on

Iraq than his enthusiasts realize. For example, in

that same February speech, he went on to say, "I do

not believe the president should have been given a

green light to drive our nation into

conflict...without a requirement that we at least try

first to work through the United Nations." That

sentence contains some artful phrasing.

In reality, Dean favored an alternative war resolution

(sponsored by Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Richard

Lugar, R-Ind.) that differed little from the one that

passed. True, Biden-Lugar called on Bush to seek a

United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing

the war, but it did not require Bush to obtain such a

resolution, if the Security Council balked. In other

words, Dean favored a congressional resolution

authorizing exactly the course that Bush took.

"Howard, I think you're all over the lot on this

issue," said Rep. Dick Gephardt in a November debate.

"All over the lot" is a bit of an exaggeration: Dean

made no secret of his opposition to military action

after Congress gave Bush a green light. Still, Dean's

anti-war posture was less clear-cut—or, if you prefer,

more nuanced—than his reputation and rhetoric suggest.



In hindsight, Dean's position was not coherent, but

neither was it pacifist or hard-left. Dean touted his

support for the 1991 Persian Gulf War and for Bush's

attack on Afghanistan. He took care not to renounce

unilateralism. "I am not among those who say that

America should never use its armed forces

unilaterally," he said in his February speech—one of

several such statements. In an Associated Press

interview that month, he said: "I am not in the no-way

camp. Definitely not. I think Saddam must be disarmed.

The problem I have is that I have a deep reluctance to

attack a country unilaterally without a pretty high

standard of proof."

Dean said he believed Saddam "may well" possess

chemical and biological weapons. What he had not seen,

he maintained, was sufficient evidence that such

weapons posed an imminent threat. Shortly after

Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a speech to the

United Nations, presented the administration's

evidence of the Iraqi menace, Dean said: "I was

impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by

the secretary, but rather by its sketchiness." Going

to war, Dean said, requires either an international

consensus or smoking-gun evidence of an imminent

threat—not necessarily both, but one or the other. The

Bush administration had neither.

Dean's position was incoherent because it called for

containing Saddam through continued inspections, which

continued only because of the threat of unilateral

force that Dean would have withdrawn. That

contradiction will come back to bite him if the Bush

administration looks triumphant in Iraq next summer

and fall. Bush will say, "If Howard Dean were

president of the United States, Saddam Hussein would

still be president of Iraq." Dean will go down.

If, however, the situation in Iraq looks dismal in

eight months, Dean's position will look pretty good.

He will say he favored prudence over both pacifism and

recklessness. He will remind voters that he said, in

October of 2002, "The president has never said what

the truth is, which is if we go into Iraq we will be

there for 10 years.... The president must tell us that

before we go." Dean will be able to position himself

as the prescient moderate.

On domestic policy, Dean has even more room to

maneuver. Fiscally, he is to the right of where Bill

Clinton was in 1992. Clinton, as everybody soon

forgot, ran as a big-spending, heavy-handed liberal.

He wanted to require all but the smallest companies to

spend 1.5 percent of their payroll on employee

training. He wanted $80 billion for new public works.

He promised universal health coverage for free. He

promised all sorts of new tax breaks. He ducked the

deficit. By contrast, Dean describes himself as a

fiscal conservative who balances budgets. "I'm a

thrifty person," he said in a July speech, "and I hate

waste and inefficiency." Howard Dean, meet Calvin

Coolidge.

On health care, Dean is solidly in the Democratic

party's center, with a health plan that is less

ambitious and less costly than Gephardt's—to say

nothing of Clinton's. A National Journal panel of

experts gave Dean's plan a "moderate [score] for the

numbers of uninsured Americans [it] would pick up." On

trade, Dean is to Clinton's left, demanding that trade

pacts be renegotiated to include labor and

environmental standards. Even here, however, he has

given himself some room by suggesting that the

standards might be set by the International Labor

Organization, not necessarily by the United States. In

any case, Dean's domestic policies, taken as a group,

arguably place him to the right of candidate Clinton.

Has Dean mortgaged his future to his far-left

supporters? Doubtful. Liberals' enthusiasm for Dean is

not necessarily the same thing as Dean's enthusiasm

for liberals. He governed as a moderate in Vermont,

and his two decades in politics mark him as a

centrist, a fact with which he would ceaselessly

regale his audiences beginning the day after winning

the nomination. Even if he has "drunk the Kool-Aid of

his own campaign" (as one political observer put it),

he will have plenty of time to swallow the centrist

antidote next year. Most voters, apart from fierce

Democratic partisans, will not tune in until then.

As for those fierce Democratic partisans, they will

tolerate any kind of repositioning in order to defeat

Bush. In the heat of battle, all that will matter will

be Dean's status as Our Side's Guy. The passion and

loyalty that Dean is building on the left today will

not so much tie him down as free him up, securing the

same sort of trusting base, and therefore the same

sort of license to shift toward the center, that

Ronald Reagan enjoyed in 1980.

As evidence that progressive Democrats will forgive

Dean for all kinds of impurities, I offer the fact

that they are already doing so. On June 17, in a

statement to the progressive Web site MoveOn.org, Dean

said that the doctrine of "pre-emptive war" was wrong

and dangerous; he promised to "tear up the Bush

doctrine" on his first day in office. On June 25, in a

speech before the establishmentarian Council on

Foreign Relations, he instead criticized only the

"misuse" of the doctrine, saying it "is not a

comprehensive strategy." The Left didn't mind.

On September 4, Dean said America's troops in Iraq

"need to come home." The Left didn't mind five days

later when, asked if he would favor a troop pullout,

Dean said, "We can't do that. We cannot lose the peace

in Iraq... If we leave Iraq to chaos, Al Qaeda may

move in." Nor do progressives seem to mind that Dean

calls for universal health insurance while proposing

no such thing. Nor, indeed, do they mind his support

for a Senate resolution that would have authorized

Bush's war on Iraq.

The Left loves Dean because he stands up to Bush and

does not seem like a fast-footed career politician. If

in actuality he is a fast-footed career politician, as

the record suggests—well, so much the better. Being

one without seeming like one is political gold. Ask

Bill Clinton.

The point is not that Dean, should he win the

nomination, will beat Bush. The point is that Dean is

no pushover. Republicans chortling that Dean would be

the next McGovern had better watch out: He may be the

next Clinton.

© Copyright 2003 National Journal

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for

National Journal and a frequent contributor to REASON.

This article was originally published by National

Journal.