I don't think this is a fair gloss of the blog entry, Nathan: you were right about the anti-union throw away lines, but not here. The analysis is more thoughtful and sophisticated than you allow. It does not suggest that Dean is a McGovern in terms of being far to the left or unable to reach out to the center. Rather, it suggests that there may well be a downside to Dean's success on the Internet -- that all he has done is use a new campaign technology to very successfully mobilize a base which is limited, much as McGovern did with direct mail in 1972, so it appears that he has more support than he actually does. Without the capacity to reach out beyond that base, he is in trouble. I think that the Dean campaign needs to think about this problem, rather than rest on laurels that may seem to be more than they actually are.

I'm more concerned about Dean's contradictory statements on issues. That's one of the problems McGovern had. Dean's statements in the 90s concerning Medicare are downright disturbing. He's finally acknowledged that he was a strong supporter of NAFTA. I'm glad he's apparently changed his position on both, but it makes me wonder who the real Dean is. Is appeal to left-labor just a facade? Will the DLC Dean reappear should he be nominated, or if he is elected?

Paleo-- There's little question that Dean is not as good on trade issues as Gephardt. If you want the person who is down-the-line right on labor issues, you do go with Gephardt or even better Kucinich. But the question is far broader than that and he has promised to support strong labor and environmental standards in new trade deals. As for Medicare, I'll leave it to SEIU and other health care unions to figure out if there's any substance in Gephardt's charges-- they live and die on that stuff, yet they seem pretty satisfied that Dean's a good guy on these issues.

Leo-- I understand the substance of TAPPED's worry about the limits of Internet organizing. As I said, I made them back in June. But Dean has been doing far broader outreach to unions and immigrants, so the worry just seems misplaced at this point.

Nathan--You're right on Dean, his use of the Web, and the timing of any criticism--and I'm not even a Dean supporter. When I read Wolff's New York piece this week I was underwhelmed. Anybody who thinks the Internet is all win-win is wrong. Anyone who thinks targeting your base early is a mistake is also wrong. (What choice do you have?) Anyone who thinks you go effortlessly from victory to victory once you've mobilized your base and without shifting gears of some kind shouldn't be in politics. Wolff's is a one-note item stretched to infinity. Five hundred words as a cautionary tale would have sufficed.

Nathan,

Regarding Medicare, they aren't "charges," but actual statements Dean made regarding use of HMOs in the program and cutting its budget. Maybe Dean has changed his view on this, as he apparently has done on trade. If so, let him say so and explain his thinking at the time. Just saying Gephardt is being "negative" is not a sufficient answer.

It's true that there's no "perfect" candidate in the race. Even the one I like the best, Kucinich, voted in favor of the flag burning amendment. But in Dean's, and Clark's, case, I am concerned about a candidate who is "posing"; someone who is claiming to be more "left" than he really is.

Not that I'm an experience politico by any stretch, but it would seem to me that Dean has the one quality that the lion's share of the other contenders don't: he can move a crowd. And for me, that becomes a significant issue come election time. I think one of the primary reasons Gore didn't make it is because he's stiff - he can't move a crowd. I think he was learning how as the campaign progressed - but he got better too late.

And yeah, why the supreme effort by some to split hairs with Dean. There's no perfect candidate, and each of them have the weaknesses - some more than others. But I think Dean so far has proved most if not all of the doubters wrong. And if he's willing to change his mind on NAFTA, more power to him. And maybe he is trying to suck up to labor - what do you think politics is? It's the art of sucking up to your constituents.

Just my 25 cents...

The political punditry being so wrong and so out of touch, as in the articles you cite, is itself a factor in Dean's success--in Pirandelloesque fashion-- they continue to offer "analyses" that reflect the tired, out-of-touch center of the political class, constantly doing nothing more than trying to maintain some kind of status quo which includes them as a factor.

I can only report that as a regula joe, I hear enthusiasm or interest in Dean from Republicans who don't know what a blog is, but are desperate for the Democratic Party to offer a strong opponent to Bush and his policies, and from young people who don't bother with political blogs at all.

My impression from the beginning is that Dean is a candidate which has promising broad appeal, but was forced to find ways to bypass the Democratic Party insider cattle shute.

_The Economist_ likens Dean to Jimmy Carter, not McGovern ... "outsider" to Washington, idiosyncratic policy positions that do not conform to standard-issue liberal vs. conservative
divide, maybe most interestingly a combination of peeling back imperial overstretch and fiscal rectitude, i.e. attempting to prolong U.S. hegemony by ably recognizing geopolitical and
budgetary limits ... of course Carter post-1978 ditched this orientation when the U.S. ruling class got more and more nervous about the way in
which a loose money policy was aiding and abetting
independent Third World development and threatening the end of dollar primacy, and when
Zbig and other national security types decided to heat up the thawed Cold War.

John Gulick

Heh -- I posted a blog entry a few days ago comparing Dubya to Jimmy Carter, as follows:

My model is that GWB is a Republican version of Jimmy Carter. Think of the parallels. Elected on a very thin margin. A less moderate
administration than what the campaign led people to expect. Trouble managing the economy. Grandiose foreign policy goals, but (arguably) poor results....

Then, suddenly, the embattled president gets a lucky break: the other party goes and nominates a candidate from what the White House regards as the extreme ideological fringe. The President and his advisers become arrogant and overconfident: they can't see how they could lose. But they do.

The Republican pollsters and strategists, quoted by [David] Brooks in the NYT piece, are quietly hooting with glee over Howard Dean['s rise]. I remember their Democratic counterparts saying almost precisely the same things, in precisely the same tone, about Ronald Reagan in 1980.