I just finished reading Howard Dean's latest fundraising appeal (you can read it here), and it looks like the Democrats will have trouble against John McCain in the fall. Why? Dean's letter attempts to portray a McCain presidency as a third term for George W. Bush. But it doesn't hold up. Dean actually writes that McCain "looked the other way as Jack Abramoff bought and paid for the Republican Party and the Culture of Corruption." Um, I wrote an entire book in which McCain was one of the few Republican heroes in the Abramoff affair. Besides which, whether you agree with the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, and I don't, you can't really argue that McCain is trying to make lobbyists' lives easier. Quite the contrary.
Next comes immigration, an issue on which Dean says McCain has aligned himself "with the most extreme elements of the Republican Party." Has Dean not been paying attention to American politics for the last two years?
After immigration is Iraq. Here Dean attacks McCain's distorted comment that American troops might remain in Iraq for up to a century. Democrats interpret this as meaning McCain wants the war to go on for a century. This is silliness, of course. As McCain has explained, American troops have remained in Germany and Japan since the end of World War II, Korea since the cease-fire, and the Balkans since the 1990s. It's not American presence in Iraq that's the problem, McCain argues, it's American casualties in Iraq. And McCain has a more plausible claim than most when he says he pushed for a change in strategy which reduced American casualties and led to the slow, tenuous progress we see today in Iraq.
On abortion, Dean accuses McCain of promising to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. McCain hasn't said this, either. What McCain has said is that he would appoint judges in the mold of Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas - jurists who strictly interpret the constitution. This is the conservative position on the judiciary. And it is a winning one.
Finally, Dean dredges up a quote in which McCain admits he doesn't know a whole lot about economics. This is true, and McCain, as the likely nominee of the incumbent party, is vulnerable in the midst of an economic slowdown and possible recession. But McCain has plenty of time in which to straighten out his economic policies and rhetoric.
Then there are the issues which Dean doesn't mention. He doesn't mention McCain's popular stances on Guantanamo Bay and interrogations, on climate change, on pork-barrel spending. Dean does not mention these issues because they are issues on which McCain and independents and Democrats align.
Best part of Dean's letter: When he correctly identifies McCain as a "media darling." This from the spokesman of a party who has benefited from media "cocooning" for decades. Political justice is sweet, isn't it?
