Word: democratization
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There are no time-outs in presidential politics. Soon after the primaries yield a consensus Democratic nominee, the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Republicans will begin an air war, Republican sources tell TIME--instantly spending a good part of the $99 million the party will have in the bank to define that Democrat before most of the country can pick him out of a lineup...
...that Democrat is John Kerry, how would Republicans come after him? Although he has spent nearly two decades in the Senate, it's his two years as Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis in the 1980s that will form the template for the attack. Sixteen years ago this winter, the earnest Governor of Massachusetts was favored to be elected President. But Bush pere prevailed, of course, by portraying Dukakis as soft on defense, out of touch on values and lenient on crime. Look for a similar though not identical pitch this time. "There's a lot to mine in the Dukakis...
...always be the world's strongest. Senator Kerry's voting record would make Governor Dean's vision a reality," says Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman. But the Bush team knows that if Kerry, a pugnacious campaigner, is the nominee, he won't be passive, like a previous Massachusetts Democrat. As a presidential adviser put it, "He won't make that Dukakis mistake...
Even when an election is not months away, such probes mean different things to different people. To Democrats, a blue-ribbon panel would discover whether Administration hard-liners shopped around for intelligence that fit their war aims. "The Administration made a conscious decision to cherry-pick the intelligence and to make the most aggressive case possible ... based upon its belief that [ousting Saddam] was the right thing to do," says Indiana's Evan Bayh, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. "The caveats were in there from the beginning, but they became increasingly less emphasized and then finally were dropped altogether...
...question keeps bugging me. Why have I been rooting for Howard Dean to win the Democratic nomination? I'm not a Democrat or even, in contemporary parlance, a liberal. In pure policy terms, I'm probably closer to John Kerry and John Edwards. What's more, Dean's insistence that war against Saddam was wrong strikes me as morally and strategically misguided. His loose accusations of lying in the White House, his airing of notions that George W. Bush had a warning about 9/11, his bad temper and his occasional nastiness are all reasons to back his opponents...