Dean understood early on that after the 2000 election all the demented rage in what’s left of the Democratic Party would fester, and focus on GWB. Dean has rode that hate, and his limited ability, to the top of his Party. We are watching one of the great Party mealtdowns in recent political history.

That’s an interesting theory, that Dean saw the rage over the 2000 election, and made a conscious decision to gear his candidacy toward it. If it’s correct, it backs up something I’ve said since the beginning of the Bush presidency. I said that Bush made a terrible mistake in never addressing the nation about the Florida election crisis after it was over. He needed to address the charges of the other side. There were all these fantastic assertions that the Dems were believing that if they weren’t corrected, would fester for years. But Bush didn’t do that. He did what he needed to do to win the post-election contest, but he didn’t nothing to INFORM and PERSUADE the people on the other side. And so they were all free to continue in their insane beliefs about “disenfranchisement,” about blacks being blocked from voting by police barracades, and so on. A large part of the country was in the grip of crazy false beliefs, and it didn’t occur to Bush that he needed to heal that by speaking the truth. This was one of the worst failures of leadership I ever saw. Yet it didn’t seem to occur to anyone that such an act of leadership was called for.

In the absence of that act of leadership, the lunatic anger among many Dems continued to fester unrestrained, and the Dean candidacy is the result. Could Bush have stopped all that anger? Of course not, but if, in a national speech he had fully addressed all the false charges, it would have made a major difference.

(By the way, we can also see that failure to address the other side’s concerns in his conduct of the Iraq war. Bush has his own arguments for what he wants to do, but he never steps outside of that in order to address seriously the concerns of his critics, which is one reason why the anger against him grows so intense.)

Mr. Auster is correct in stressing that when a “myth” takes root, and festers and grows for years on end without being addressed, a new history comes into being. False or not, this new history takes on a life of its own, and becomes part of a shadow history. You notice the left always talks about the 5 justices of the high court who stole the election for GWB. They never mention the Florida high court, which of course caused most of the vote counting problems. Millions of otherwise sane Democrats believe to the very marrow of their bones Bush and the high court stole the 2000 election.

The democrat party pros manufactured a wholly factitious sense of having an election stolen, votes not counted, etc., as an unscrupulous tactic to keep their ever narrower base inflamed and assure future turnout. Now Howard Dean has targeted that inflamed core to bootstrap himself into the party nomination. It was Clinton who first moved the party to a politics of maximizing turnout by inflaming the base, but he managed to hold onto a portion of the middle by riding over some leftist pieties ( adopting welfare reform, balanced budget). Now the competition for the wacko base is moving the whole field of candidates ever farther left and away from essential concerns of most voters.

I have not studied, and cannot speak with authority, on the dispute over the election of 2000. It may be worth pointing out, to those hysterical over the issue and convinced of Bush’s unique evil, that the only modern Presidential election that was definitely stolen was that of the election of 1960… and that with the help of the Mafia, with which Joseph Kennedy coolly conspired at least as early as 1959. Not even Bush’s worst enemies have suggested that he collaborated with organized crime.

The Democrats are the experts at stealing elections. My first exposure to this was a 1984 Indiana congressional race where Repub Rick McIntyre beat Dem Frank McCloskey (decd.) by a razor-thin margin, whereupon the Democrat-controlled House threw out the results, ordered their own recount, and under ‘Tip’ O’Neill, they just kept counting one group of ballots after another until McCloskey was 4 votes ahead — and then they stopped. No possible appeal.

Here’s something I posted at Lucianne tonight about Dean:

Reply 64 - Posted by: Larry, 12/31/2003 1:28:13 AM

I continue to be completely amazed by Dean. As soon as he was crowned the all-but-inevitable nominee, one would have asssumed that he would start behaving more “statesmanlike.” Instead, day after day, he’s going out of his way to show what an immature, ignorant, undisciplined, out-of-control loon he is.

The Dean situation is like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On one hand, Dean seems unstoppable for the nomination (not because he’s so great, but because there’s apparently no other candidate who might be able to stop him). On the other hand, it’s inconceivable that a major political party, even one as way-out as the Dems, is going to nominate an actual nutcase for president. So one of two apparently impossible things is going to happen. Either Dean gets stopped, or the Democratic party nominates a nutcase.

Perhaps there is an alternative to Mr. Auster’s two impossibilities. Will the Democrats’ deus ex machina come primary season be New York’s “own” Senator Clinton? Thinking strategically like a Democrat for a minute (unpleasant exercise), a Clinton/Clark ticket might have some appeal.

Sen. Clinton has been working on her gravitas lately. She might rescue the Democrats from the overt looniness of Dr. Dean, but the Democratic faithful can be confident that she is just as Leftist as he (if not more so). Clinton would easily win the votes of the party base and non-whites. Putting Gen. Clark on the ticket, and letting him sound centrist, might attract - or at least not lose - the votes of enough whites, especially men, to put the Democrats over the top. I find Clark’s foreign and defense policy views ludicrous, but there are a great many Americans who will assume - because of those four stars he once wore - that he is both a patriot and a hawk.

President Bush has good poll numbers now, but his support may be more broad than deep. At the end of December 1991, how many of us would have bet that a challenger Clinton would defeat the President Bush who had just presided over defeating Saddam Hussein? The situations are not identical; history never quite repeats itself. The similarities are worth pondering, though.

While I think a Clinton/Clark (Clinton/anybody) administration would be a national disgrace and bad for the country, traditional conservatives might be able to turn a Republican presidential defeat in 2004 to advantage. The Bush family has given the United States two mediocre liberal Republican presidents; surely that is enough. Breaking the power Bushes have gained over the Republican Party would be no bad thing.

It is unlikely that the GOP can ever become a truly conservative party, but one of two things might result from a decisive GOP defeat. The Party might reevaluate its strategies and realize that Bush/Rove style open-borders/expanding-government liberalism is not the way to future success, thereby becoming a more (if not entirely) conservative party than it is today. A party that gives those who vote for it the back of its hand once in power may not long survive.

The other alternative - this is the one I would like to see - is that conservatives will see that the GOP not only abandons conservative positions but is simply a loser. At that point, conservatives might consider moving to a genuinely conservative new party that opposes both of the old national parties. At that point, battle could be joined between a conservative political force and the Leftist political force that is the Democratic Party. It would be an open contest between Left and Right, one the Right might win, rather than one between Left and slightly-less-Left (the GOP), in which the Right isn’t even in the fight. The Republican Party would be an irrelevant rump, its conservative former supporters having moved to the new party and its liberals having abandoned the sinking ship for the Democratic Party.

I appreciate this is making a silk purse…, and I may be too optimistic. For states’ rights paleos like me, it would also have the pleasant side effect of driving a stake through the heart of the party of Lincoln. Happy New Year! HRS

Mr. Sutherland has not provided a scenario by which this deus ex machina would come to the Dems’ rescue. Mrs. Clinton is not a candidate. She can do nothing unless there is no victor in the first ballot at the convention. So the existing candidates must get enough delegates to stop Dean in the first ballot. Modifying what I said earlier, that’s not so impossible. Dean’s lead in New Hampshire has narrowed from 30 to 20, and of course, New Hampshire is famous for upsets. So if Dean is stopped in the first ballot by a combination of strength among two or more of his competitors, but if none of his competitors has enough support to win the nomination himself, then the Hillary scenario becomes a distinct possibility.

My scenario is predicated on Sen. Clinton jumping into the race early in the New Year, around the time of the New Hampshire primary. It presupposes that Democratic power-brokers get nervous about Dean’s impetuousness and decide they need to avoid being stuck with the two unpalatable options Mr. Auster outlined in his 0123 post today. I wasn’t thinking of her emerging from the convention as a dark horse candidate, but stranger things have happened. In the event, the Democrats would lose nothing in the rage department by knocking Dean off the track to make way for Clinton; she does (self-)righteous indignation at least as well as he does.

Looking at the Democratic Party from the outside, I have the impression that Clinton is the Democrat with the strongest national name-recognition, and also the one who most appeals to the more Leftist hard-core of party activists. That is why I believe she could come into the race late and not be crippled by lack of a campaign organization - she would inherent those of other candidates as they start to drop out. I also think she would draw a lot of primary voters away from Dean, in particular.

Maybe it is not a compliment to American women to say so, but her presence on the ballot would increase female turnout in the presidential election, to her advantage. Paired with a white man VP candidate calculated to offset her negatives and appeal to mainstream white voters, Clinton could pose a very real threat to President Bush. That is why I believe that a Bush v. Clinton fight in 2004 might have the same result as the Bush v. Clinton bout of 1992. I say that even without factoring in a Perot-surrogate to hack away at Bush’s knees. If Bush also faces a populist or rightist challenge from a nationally known third party candidate (immigration and illegal aliens make an obvious issue), he will lose. HRS

I agree with Mr.Sutherland that a Bush defeat in 04 would shock the GOP to its very core; and perhaps drive the liberal Republicans out of the Party once and for all. I remember conservatives were assured in 00 that GWB was not like GHWB, but a real consevative who had learned the lessons his father had not. Looks like the joke was on the conservative wing of the Republican Party. A defeat of GWB, at this time, would force a showdown in the Pary that has been going on since the Goldwater era, heck, since the Taft era now that I think about it.

I dread the leftist, anti-American, irrational, wildly irresponsible Democratic Party. But as I’ve said before, the only hope I see of stopping the leftward drift of the Republican party and of the mainstream conservative movement is through the defeat of Bush.

Dean is so far out that even James Carville, the Golum of American politics (have any other Tolkien watchers noticed the resemblance?) is expressing his concerns. Robert Novak writes:

“Carville, neutral in the race for the presidential nomination, rarely speaks ill of a fellow Democrat. But he did on CNN’s ‘Crossfire’ Monday: ‘I’m scared to death that this guy just says anything. It feels like he’s undergone some kind of a political lobotomy here.’”

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20040101.shtml

Boltering the apparent impossibility of anyone’s stopping Dean is the enormous differential between his fund raising and that of his rivals. From The Washington Times:

“In the fourth quarter, Mr. Dean has raised more than $14 million, while Rep. Dick Gephardt has only taken in a little over $3 million and Mr. Kerry less than $4 million.”

How quickly the inevitable becomes evitable! As of Friday evening, January 9, the consensus at Lucianne.com is that Dean cannot win the Democratic nomination

http://lucianne.com/threads2.asp?artnum=104313

And speaking of Gov. Dean getting crazier, he now claims that his pro-homo decisions are based on his Christian faith: “Howard Dean said Wednesday that his decision as governor to sign the bill legalizing civil unions for gays in Vermont was influenced by his Christian views…”

And Dean himself saith:

“The overwhelming evidence is that there is very significant, substantial genetic component to it. From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people.”

Now there’s logic for you…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63152-2004Jan7?language=printer

But the latest flap is over accusations by his Demo rivals that he is importing Non-Iowans to impersonate Iowans in the forthcoming caucus:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36522

I’m at a loss to know just how much ‘crazier’ things can get!