Divisive Demos Might Hand It to Bush

Once again yesterday Joe Lieberman raised the tired but headline-grabbing Confederate flag issue (reported here, Nov. 17th entry) to try to deal the Dean for President campaign another blow. Lieberman, Kerry, Gephardt, and the other candidates attacked Dean with such vigor over that Confederate flag statement that you would think Dean's a bigger enemy to them than Bush.

Sadly, these divisive tactics by the other Democrats will almost certainly put Bush right back into the White House in 2004. There's recent research by Professor Larry Sabato and the University of Virginia Center for Politics that backs that up.

Dean made that Confederate flag statement over two weeks ago and has since apologized. After Dean's apology Lieberman said "...As far as I'm concerned, he's done it, it's over. Let's move on and talk about the issues." But now, undaunted by his own hypocrisy, Lieberman is back with new statements and even a TV commercial about the Confederate flag flap.

There's been much said in the press about how the other candidates took Dean's remarks out of context, and how they are using the same race-baiting tactics that the Republicans do to confuse Democratic voters (see Paul Krugman's column, or these blogs at TheConch and Anger Management).

Now Democrats are using these highly-charged symbols to attack their own. Don't they realize that the damage from these attacks will endure well beyond the primaries? Do they hope to make Dean less "electable" by making these negative associations stick?

These highly-charged attacks have a long half-life. The media picks them up, distorts them, and they stick. They will still be around when it's time for the Democratic nominee to go head-to-head with Bush, and you can bet the Bush crew won't shy away from using them.

The Confederate flag issue was publicized first by the Kerry and Gephardt campaigns, which coordinated their separate PR attacks for maximum impact and press coverage. Sensing blood, Lieberman, Edwards, and Sharpton all darted in with strongly-worded attacks of their own. Sharpton has called Dean "anti-black". Edwards' get-tough line was "Let me tell you, the last thing we need in the South is somebody like you coming down and telling us what we need to do."

These candidates seem willing to permanently damage the frontrunner's long-term chances to gain short-term popularity blips of their own. In particular Sharpton and Edwards are trying to turn their own core constituencies against Dean, which will make it that much harder to gain their support back later.

In their desperation Dean's challengers seem to think they must get their jabs in now or never, and that they must deliver them with great force.

The real enemy of the Democrats is not Howard Dean, but internal divisiveness. Sabato explains how damaging this can be in a recent article titled "Democrats: Competition is Fine, but Divisiveness Spells Defeat".

In modern, television-age elections (1960-2000), vigorous intra-party competition with a multitude of candidates did not hurt a party's chances of capturing the White House in many cases. But divisive nomination politics that left open wounds or exposed a party's unbridgeable fault lines did strongly suggest a disastrous November result.

He sums it up like this:

...competition that leads to major, obvious party division has always produced November defeat in both parties since 1960.

Let's face it, the campaign for Democratic presidential nominee is already divisive. The DLC started it on that track when they launched the first attacks on Dean and started the "catastrophic McGovern collapse" meme. They did not reckon on Dean's broad appeal to core Democrats and his campaign's fund-raising prowess. Having come out strongly against Dean from the start, the DLC will have a very hard time reconciling with him should he win the nomination.

William Mayer makes a good case that Democrats generally run more divisive primary campaigns than Republicans do, with Republicans far more likely to rally around a single frontrunner early in the process.

The best hope for the Democrats is to get behind their frontrunner as early as possible in 2004. Dean's early surge and his proven ability to energize core Democrats gives them a chance to do that. But it's not clear that the leaders of the Democratic party will capitalize on this opportunity. They may be too blinded by quid pro status quo insider politics to even try to harness the Dean phenomonon.

I believe that Dean or any one of the other moderate candidates in the Democratic field such as Clark, Kerry and even Edwards, could defeat Bush in 2004 if he is given the full and early support of the Democratic Party itself. But that support has not been forthcoming for Dean. The sooner it is given, and given freely, the better for the Democrats.

If the DLC camp chooses to make a final stand against Dean at the Convention then any hope for real unity behind the eventual nominee would be lost. Steven Taylor at PoliBlog highlights another article by Sabato that describes the role of Super-Delegates and the chances that they might be used to block a Dean nomination. (As a side note, James Joyner of Outside the Beltway makes a good point about how the use of Super-Delegates really contradicts the Democrats' professed support of "the little guy"!).

Regardless of who would win in a brokered convention, the public would see dramatic divisions within the party. According to Sabato's research that would probably mean another four years for Bush.

There is enough common cause to eventually bind most Democrats together in the fight against Bush, so I agree that a brokered convention where Super-Delegates conspire to deny Dean the nomination is unlikely. But the real question is: how much damage will the other Democrats do to the Dean campaign by then?

The other Democrats have every right to tout their differences on the issues, to describe why they are the best for the job, and to criticise the statements and actions of the other candidates. But there needs to be a return to civility, to an honorable discourse shorn of barbs and low blows. If they continue these polarizing, negative, and emotionally-charged tactics in their efforts to thwart Dean, then they will be hurting us all.