I realized Dean was in trouble back when the former Gephardt staffers ran that sleazy Osama-Dean ad.
I knew right then that the attacks on him would never stop coming.
I'm not about to whine, but I'm hard-pressed to remember a candidate in my lifetime who was ripped so horrendously by his own party.
It was not without a moment of cynical head-shaking that I read today's story in the NY Times that Al Sharpton was fed the information on the lack of minority appointments in Dean's Vermont cabinet by a former Clinton operative. (And where did Sharpton get funds to pay for a high-priced former Clinton consultant?)
What did Sharpton stand to gain from making that slam on Dean? He was going nowhere. Someone fill me in...
Yeah, I know that some on here want to dismiss the DLC-Clinton connection to the steady dose of Dean slams as "tinfoil hat" territory, but the longer this campaign has gone on -- and the more vicious the hits Dean has taken from the entire group of establishment Dems -- the more convinced I am that it's not simply a "tinfoil" theory. It was a concerted effort by Party insiders to discredit him.
Yeah, he made plenty of mistakes on his own as did Trippi. (The negative advertising in Iowa hurt him big time from what I heard going door-to-door.) But the steady pounding took its toll, too.
The spin on his Iowa speech may prove to be the final nail in his coffin. We'll see soon enough.
As a lifelong Democrat, the entire process has disgusted me. And Kerry's negative calls/push polling in Iowa and now, apparently in New Hampshire serve as the icing on the cake.
It is a rare presidential election where I have had a candidate I could support wholeheartedly with energy, enthusiasm and money. Dean was /is one of those rare candidates. (I think back on Mo Udall as another.) But to see my own Party tear down one of its own because the candidate threatened the ties to corporate money which have so derailed our party since the Clinton years is just a damn shame.
I spent a lot of time in Iowa talking with several people who have known Howard Dean for a very long time. Yeah, he has his faults, but their stories about him caring first and foremost for children proved (even more) that he is that rare breed of politician who reaches the presidential campaign level and still believes that being in politics is about public service, not self service.
What a breath of fresh air.
No wonder people like the DLC leadership were so threatened by him...