POLITICS-US: Gore Endorsement Boosts Dean as Race Accelerates

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 2003 (IPS) - Former Vice President Al Gore’s surprise endorsement Tuesday of Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination marks a major boost for the insurgent former Vermont governor who was already leading his party rivals in both popularity and collecting campaign cash.

In Gore’s endorsement, Dean obtained not only the backing of a leader of the Democratic Party Establishment, but the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate who actually defeated President George W. Bush in the popular vote and was denied electoral victory as a result of voting irregularities in Florida and the intervention of five Supreme Court justices, all appointed by Republican presidents.

"This is huge," said Donna Brazile, Gore’s 2000 campaign manager, in what was the most widely quoted analysis of Gore’s move when it first leaked out Monday night.

"It gives Dean what Dean has been missing most – stature. Gore is a major-league insider, somebody with enormous credibility that Democrats respect, who can rally the grass roots and who’s been speaking very strongly in the last few months about the direction he wants to take the country," she added.

That indeed seemed to be the consensus among pundits here shortly after Gore made his endorsement official in a joint appearance with Dean at a campaign stop in Harlem.

"Al Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean …now makes him the all but prohibitive favourite to win the nomination," wrote Matthew Rothschild, editor of the ‘Progressive’ magazine.

His analysis was shared by pro-Bush commentators. "It’s come to this: Republicans are getting their wish," wrote Clifford May, a neo-conservative pundit for the National Review Online. "Dean is the candidate most have prayed for."

But May and fellow-neo-conservative William Kristol of The Weekly Standard warned Republicans not to become complacent. Comparing the former doctor to the unheralded Kansas State University football team which crushed the Number One-ranked Oklahoma Sooners last week, Kristol noted that "Dean has run a terrific primary campaign, the most impressive since (former President Jimmy) Carter in 1976" and is unlikely "to be a patsy for a Bush assault" in the presidential race.

When Gore announced he would not run for the nomination in 2004, he made clear that he hoped to endorse a candidate in a way and at a time that would make a major difference in the selection process. He has also reportedly expressed concern that the primary process, which officially gets underway in the Iowa caucuses Jan. 19, would promote more strife within the party and eventually produce a worn and battered candidate who would have a difficult time mobilising the party behind him.

He appears to have calculated that an early endorsement could give Dean enough momentum to persuade a number of his rivals to get out now, thus giving the party much more time to prepare for the campaign against Bush.

He stressed this in his remarks in Harlem. "We can’t afford to be divided among ourselves to the point that we lose sight of how important it is for America," Gore said. "We don’t have the luxury of fighting among ourselves to the point where we seriously damage our ability to win on behalf of the American people this time around."

In his remarks, Gore also stressed two other reasons why he had decided to endorse Dean. Dean, he said, "really is the only candidate who has been able to inspire at the grassroots level all over this country the kind of passion and enthusiasm for democracy and change and transformation of America that we need in this country."

Indeed, of all the candidates, Dean has consistently energised his supporters with a speaking style that is direct, unscripted, and even combative, a strong contrast to his major, more Washington-oriented rivals, such as Sen. John Kerry and former House Majority Leader, Rep. Richard Gephardt.

But his campaign’s use of the Internet as a tool of organisation and fund-raising has also drawn widespread praise, particularly when the cyber-anti-war group, MoveOn.org, effectively attached itself to Dean several months ago after an on-line vote by its contributors. The Internet and its potential for promoting democratic participation have long been major interests of Gore.

The second and more substantive reason that Gore gave for his decision was Dean’s early opposition to the war in Iraq, something on which Gore has himself been very outspoken since the Bush administration first began its push for war in September 2002.

"(Dean) was the only major candidate who made the correct judgment about the Iraq war," said Gore, who described Bush’s decision to divert the war against al-Qaeda to Iraq a "catastrophic mistake".

In fact, several of the Democratic candidates, notably former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, all opposed the war, too, but none has been able to gain any traction in the campaign to date and are generally considered marginal.

Four other contenders – Gephardt, Kerry, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and Sen. John Edwards – voted, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or unease, for going to war when the resolution came up in Congress last fall. The fifth, ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, has also said he would have voted for the resolution at the time, but then emerged, like Kerry in particular, as a strong critic as Bush made clear his determination to wage the war without U.N. or NATO support. Gore himself spoke out strongly against the war before Congress voted on the resolution.

Of all the candidates, Gore’s endorsement of Dean probably hurts Lieberman the most, if only because Lieberman was Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000, although he later criticised Gore for running too populist a campaign.

But his endorsement may also prove costly to Gephardt, who has indicated he may withdraw from the race if he does not defeat Dean in the Iowa polls next month.

Despite Dean’s original opposition to the war, his political positions tend to be centrist, and he opposes withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq now that they are there. Like the other major Democratic candidates, he supports transferring the occupation to the United Nations in the hope that more countries will contribute funds and troops to Iraq.

Despite his centrist views in the Party, his combative style and his lack of Washington experience give him a more populist image that his backers believe is necessary to beat Bush.