With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
Tuesday Nov. 25, 2003; 1:14 p.m. EST
Don't look now, Howard Dean, but Bill and Hillary Clinton are leaving the Democratic Party - and they're taking the party's campaign cash with them.
So says Dick Morris, the longtime Clinton advisor who masterminded Mr. Clinton's presidential reelection victory in 1996.
"Dean seems destined to win the nomination and with it control of the party," Morris writes in today's New York Post. "So the Clintons are moving out."
Morris sees the creation of alternative fundraising operations like Americans Coming Together as a bid by the Clintons to protect their assets while the Vermont liberal leads the official party to electoral disaster next November.
Noting that Bill and Hillary have recruited fundraising scandal veteran Harold Ickes to find ways of camouflaging otherwise illegal million dollar donations from the likes of party fatcats George Soros and Peter Lewis, Morris contends:
"Ickes is about as independent of Hillary as Bill is. He is her chief advisor. His photo graces her memoirs. He was her key operative in securing the Senate seat in New York. To pretend that anything he would do is independent of Hillary is like saying that the left hand is independent of the right hand."
The one-time White House political guru says that the former first couple view the Dean juggernaut "with alarm" - and that Ickes' job is to "circumvent the Democratic Party and establish a lifeboat in the form of Americans Coming Together."
Mr. Ickes himself added fuel to rumors of a Clinton-Dean split when he told Time magazine last week that he thought the ex-Vermont Governor was too "quick of lip, and quick of temper and stubborn."
Ickes also complained that "in another time" Dean's Confederate flag remarks "would have taken him down the drain."
Predicts Morris, "Dean, upon copping the [nomination], is likely to fire Terry McAuliffe and take control of the Democratic National Committee. No longer will its coffers be available to the Clintons to use as their private fund, channeling donations to candidates and causes they favor or that favor them."
But thanks to Ickes and Americans Coming Together, when Dean takes over he'll be the party's leader in name only - with the DNC a mere shell of its former self.
Meanwhile Bill and Hillary will retain the real power - control over the Soros-Lewis gazillions - and with it the ability to determine the Democratic Party's future for as far as the eye can see.