Core
Beliefs? Try Core Fears
Commentary by Greg Lewis / WashingtonDispatch.com
January 20, 2004
There are more than 600,00 registered Democrats in the
state of Iowa. By late Monday evening, the approximately 120,000 participants
in some 1,900 Democratic caucus meetings throughout the state's 99 counties
had expressed their preferences, and we now have a better idea of which
set of Democrat core fears prevailed. Was it the core fears of Howard
"Shining Bike Path Guerilla" Dean, or of Bill Clinton, via his
avatar Wesley Clark (although we won't know until after New Hampshire
how real this possibility is).
In the end, John Kerry moved to the front, and one of
my core fears was realized, that of having to listen to his wife, Teresa
Heinz Kerry (she of the old condiment money), hold forth in the tradition
of Barbra Streisand on the important issues of the day. Her core fears
include, as she made clear in a talk broadcast on C-Span last week, that
the arts are disappearing from education, and she does not hesitate to
expound on how John Kerry is going to bring the arts back into education,
this accompanied by an explanation of how she can't paint but she does
have a good eye and by the way she can play the piano, played it for 13
years as a matter of fact . . . The issue of the arts in education is,
if Kerry is the Democrat candidate, the odds-on favorite to be the 2004
campaign's equivalent of Al Gore's Midnight Basketball leagues. And by
the way, how come nobody in the press is making fun of Mrs. Kerry's accent
the way they did Arnold Schwarzenegger's?
This is not insignificant, this matter of core fears.
We're going to be inundated with them for the next ten months as Democrats
try to convince America to eschew the path of courage and forthrightness
and follow them down Anxiety Alley as they make the reality TV show "Fear
Factor" look like amateur night.
From the outset we need to be clear that we're talking
about "professional" core fears and not "personal"
core fears here. For instance, Howard Dean's fear that if he gets the
nomination he may be forced to unclench his teeth in order to run for
President is really a personal core fear and will most likely not be a
formal plank of the Democrat platform.
And so, although it's too early for the Democrat Party
to have put together its platform for the 2004 elections, it's not too
early to speculate as to which of the Democrats' core fears will become
the anchor planks in that document. Of course, Howard Dean's core fears
and Bill Clinton's core fears are not the same, and so a great deal depends
on whether or not Dean can wrest control of the Party away from Clinton
and Terry McAuliffe and, by extension, Wesley Clark. And in view of John
Kerry's recent rebirth in the Iowa overnight polls, we've got to give
his core fears some consideration. Bottom line: We can be pretty sure
that by enumerating some of the candidates' core fears, we can get an
early clue to the new direction that's likely to be taken in the Democrat
Party platform.
Kerry's actually pretty easy. His core fears almost all
center on military uniforms. While he's playing up his service in Vietnam
(for which I thank him profoundly and for which he has my respect and
admiration), he's also very worried that liberal women are turned off
by the sight of a man in uniform. (He wouldn't have this problem if he
were a Republican. At that end of the political spectrum, uniforms play
pretty well, as witness the response to our President in a flight suit
on the deck of an aircraft carrier.) And so, if Kerry is the nominee,
we can be pretty sure that one plank in the platform will articulate a
promise not to flaunt military garb, this to complement his Midnight Art
Class plank.
Howard Dean, on the other hand, fears only other Democrats,
and not without reason. His most pressing core fear seems to be that President
Bush will show some vulnerability in the next six months and Democrats,
knowing he hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell even if Bush is vulnerable,
will at the last minute ditch him and draft Hillary, even if he was chosen
fair and square at the convention. This fear is at the root of Dean's
most recent outbursts of petulance, in which he first threatened that
his supporters would withdraw, pack up, and go home, there to sit out
the election altogether if he's not the Democratic candidate. He then
complained that his fellow Democrats were treating him unfairly and ran
some pretty vicious attack ads on them, which had the effect of emphasizing
just how much of a one-note candidate he really is.
As long as it was Dean's ball, if he went home in a snit,
then the game was over. He might just have been able to leverage his little-kid
outburst into a guarantee of his candidacy; Democrats are that weak this
year. However, since Clark has been cherry-picking in New Hampshire while
the rest of the Dems are slugging it out in the heartland, the Dean threat
seems less likely to become reality.
There's really not much point in delving into Bill Clinton's
core fears. It's obvious that the biggest of those is that he'll lose
control over the Democratic Party coffers, that he and his cronies will
be unable to continue to oversee one of the most striking losses of power
and influence ever witnessed in American politics. Clinton's disastrous
"leadership" of the party has meant that Democrats have been
marginalized in a way that would have seemed unimaginable even after the
1994 mid-year election debacle, the first of the Clinton losses. One has
only to look at the slate of candidates vying for the nomination to understand
that, if they think they can get one of these bozos elected, the Democrats
have completely lost touch with the electorate. This can pretty much be
laid at the feet of Bill Clinton.
It's worth noting that Democrat core fears center almost
exclusively on themselves and have nothing to do with the real issues
facing the nation, primary among them being national security. And so,
it waits for the prescient and incisive TV talk show host to ask the question
that's really on the minds of most Americans with regard to Democratic
candidates for President. That question is not "What are your core
beliefs?" Rather, it is, "What are your core fears?"
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