This is an Attack Site?

This is an Attack Site?

Dick Gephardt is running a website called DeanFacts. It's meant to show that Howard Dean is unsupportable for the Presidency by citing Dean's actual positions on issues. If I knew nothing else about Dean than what's here, though, I'd be half-inclined to vote for the boy. Dean on Medicare, Social Security, balancing the budget, and so forth and so on: it all sounds pretty good to me.

The only issue is that, even on this site, there's the constant invocation of the need to cut defense spending. That is, in the middle of a war, insane. And the war is, of course, why Dean can't win this upcoming election. There's simply no way that a majority of Americans will vote for the anti-war candidate, or for cuts in military spending at this juncture. The GWOT trumps everything right now, and rightly so.

Need more proof that Dean is doomed? Try FundRace, which has this handy money-map. Dean--or any other Democratic candidate for the Presidency--will need to split the South. It doesn't have to be a big split, if they do well everywhere else, but they will need to win at least one Southern state because, if they win no Southern states, they have to win fully 70% of the races in the rest of the country to get enough electoral votes. Donations are a good indicator of where the candidates are going to find solid support--people who send cash will support you at the polls, too. Select "Howard Dean" in the money mapper, and then compare with GWB. There are two things to notice:

1) Dean, at his darkest, is a full shade lighter in every area from Texas to the Carolinas. In most parts of these states, he doesn't register.
2) The only reason it's even that close is that the money-mapper uses different scales for different candidates. GWB has to raise $3.2 million from a county to get the darkest green; Dean only needs $1.4 million, less than half that. If you plotted it on the same scale, Dean would hardly register in the South at all, excepting a few urban areas like Dallas and Atlanta. Some of that will be because Dean is having to compete with the other Democrats for monetary support, whereas Bush is getting all the Republican money. Even factoring that in, though, it looks like a solid South again in 2004.

I think Dean could have won in a non-wartime election year. I don't think people will take him seriously as a wartime candidate. Excepting those who were always opposed to the war--if we're talking about the Iraq war instead of the GWOT, which is where anti-war sentiment was highest, that's about twenty percent--Dean's not going to draw a lot of support. He's certainly not going to win in the South.

UPDATE: I'm apparently not the only one who thinks this way. This is from the Seattle Times:

"Anybody could win," said Merle Black, political-science professor at Emory University. But "right now, with the economy improving as it is, if Howard Dean is the nominee, he'd have a very hard time winning any of the Southern states."

And more...

"There's a lot of money in Texas to be donated to both political parties, so Dean had to come drag the bag," said Court Koenning, executive director of the Harris County Republican Party. But "he's gonna get his clock cleaned in the general election. I'll run around naked and you can call me Sally if Bush loses Texas."

And then there's this, from the world's most trusted news source.