I don't know if the good doctor will use this loophole. Hell, I don't even know if Joe Trippi's thought about it. However, here's how Dean can shore up his greatest weakness, his extreme position on the Bush tax cuts.
- Dean has said he wants to repeal "all of Bush's tax cuts."
- His opponents criticize him for wanting to get rid of "good, middle class tax cuts" like the child credit that were proposed, initially, by the Democrats.
thus
- Dean clarifies that when he said he wanted to get rid of all of Bush's tax cuts, that meant all of the tax cuts that came from the White House and Grover Norquist.
- Dean co-opts the tax policy consensus shared by his Democratic opponents.
Just to be clear, people, I'm a Dean supporter. I think he can weather the inevitable cries of 'flip-flop' that this move will produce. This is because no matter how many flip-flops any of the Democrats take, they are fighting a man who can be proven a hypocrite by exhibiting his campaign speeches followed by his state of the union addresses, as the Daily Show demonstrated last summer. Furthermore, this can be considered an interpretation of a comment Dean has made at least once--that for all he wants to balance the budget, he'd be willing to go in the red his first term in order to achieve his goals, and thus utterly consistent.