There is an interesting article from The Hill, and after silently biting my tongue the last few days as Mayor Pete has been thrown everything but la cocina. So this Left-Handed, Gay, Anchor Baby, White LatinO pondered about what lies ahead as this dynamic has the recipe to affect whomever is our nominee.
Fifteen years ago, liberals found a rising champion in Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D), the only major contender in the Democratic race who had vocally opposed the war in Iraq. Dean's populist appeal drew huge crowds at West Coast campaign stops, and his poll numbers in Iowa rose steadily.
Standing in his way was the man Dean had supported for president in 1988, Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader. Gephardt, from neighboring Missouri, cultivated a blue collar Midwestern moderation and banked on support from one of the key pillars of the Democratic electorate, organized labor.
I was a Deaniac back then… I voted for Kerry in the general but in my mind I was… well he is like meh… but look at the mess in Iraq… Bush 2 ( back then in my mind the worst president in history), will never win...we know what happened; between getting swifted and a really unmotivated base… we lost ( this diary is not about rehashing the alleged voter fraud in Ohio).
Back then Blogs and social media was in its puberty so there were no real partisan refuges just the newbies DKOS or MyDD. We didn't comb through a candidate's twitter feed, or yearbook or even the footnotes of his/her high school paper on the Cold War.
Fifteen years later, another Northeastern populist is carving out a liberal niche. Warren does not have the benefit of a single issue on which she can contrast herself with the rest of the field, like Dean and the war in Iraq, but she has used detailed policy proposals to set her campaign apart.
Like in 2004, another Midwestern pragmatist is making a bid for the moderate lane — though a moderate in today's Democratic Party would look shockingly liberal set against the 2004 field.
Bolding mine, because yesterday I read a lot about how Mayor Pete was a "Reblican-Lite" or a RINO; I had to refrain myself from engaging and just smoked some good legal Canadian 420 and watched The Man in The High Castle y llamé a mi mamá tu check on things back to my ancestral Chile.
So in their scenario they compare Sen. Warren as the "Dean" and Pete would be the "Gephardt" leaving Biden as the "Kerry". I am not sure if there would be an equivalent to Bernie in 2004 (I'm reluctant to say Edwards?).
To arrest his slide, Dean began running advertisements showing Gephardt standing next to Bush as the president laid out his case for war in Iraq, which had turned deeply unpopular among the Democratic electorate.
"Our party and our country need new leadership," the ad intoned. Gephardt's Iowa spokesman, Bill Burton, claimed it was the first time any Democrat had run a negative advertisement before the caucuses.
I haven't seen real negative messaging from the candidates ( can't say the same from some candidate supporters on the twitterverse/FB/Dkos etc..), up until this past week.
As Dean and Gephardt escalated their feud, the ensuing months turned savage, and increasingly personal. Dean took hits from all his leading rivals, but Gephardt's attacks were the most cutting. Gephardt called Dean a "weather-vane Democrat" who carried "cynical politics of manufactured anger and false conviction." Both men accused the other of lying, and entrance polls conducted at the caucuses found most Iowans thought both men were running negative campaigns.
At the same time, Kerry and Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) started to gain. Kerry invested heavily in Iowa throughout the fall on an ad blitz portraying himself as the candidate best able to beat Bush. Edwards won the Des Moines Register's coveted endorsement.
we all now what happened next…. Kerry won, Gephart dropped after IA and Dean followed later.
Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, accused Gephardt of executing a "murder-suicide" — a label even Gephardt strategists now acknowledge.
I will end with that last quote from the article which is the question I pose this community.
"The Dean-Gephardt murder suicide was devastating for both of them," said John Lapp, who managed Gephardt's Iowa campaign. "In the even more crowded field of 2020, those thinking of picking an ugly, public Democratic primary fight should be careful."
Be very conscious that nowhere in the article , or by default me, is there a mention that the followers of one candidate will not vote for the final nominee, this is about hurting your own candidate's chances and when we start damaging the eventual nominee.