GregsOpinion.com

Mort Kondracke makes the call on this one ...

Following Gore on the Harlem program, Dean made it clear that he's mainly about solidifying the base, not reaching out to Independents.

"In 2002, we lost a lot of races in the Democratic party because we decided that we were going to go to the swing votes and we were going to try to get them and our base was going to come along later on," Dean said.

"I think it's important in this campaign that we recognize those people who were with us all along," he said. "And so we made a conscious decision to start with women, to start with the African-American community, to start with the trade union movement," as opposed to following what he said was the losing strategy of voting 85 percent of the time with President Bush.

Dean has based his entire nomination strategy on being the anti-Bush, the vessel of Democratic hatred for the president. Gore, too, has steadily become more acerbic toward Bush.

In February 2002, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Bush's State of the Union message declaring Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Gore spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and said, "there is value in calling evil by its name."

He went on to say that, as to Iraq, "a final reckoning...should be on the table," provided that "this time, if we resort to force, we must absolutely get it right... Failure cannot be an option."

Steadily, though, Gore has been more militantly against the war and against Bush, accusing him in one speech of "a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty."

And, in another speech, Gore said that the Bush administration was "determined to use fear as a political tool to consolidate its power and escape any accountability for its use."

At the Democratic convention in 2000, Gore stopped being a Clintonian centrist and became a "people versus the powerful" populist. His only nod to the center was the naming of Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) as his runningmate.

Lieberman aides noted that Lieberman found out he was Gore's choice from media reports then - just as he found out about Gore's endorsement of Dean.

On NBC's "Today" show, Lieberman correctly observed that "Al Gore is endorsing somebody who has taken positions that are diametrically opposite to what Al himself has said he believed over the years...strong on defense, for tax cuts and against walls of protectionism that take away jobs."

Gore, the 2000 populist, nearly won the presidential election. Could Dean do the same, appealing only to the Democratic base vote and simply bringing more base-like voters-young, computer-savvy liberals-to the polls?

Pundits say that Dean will do more than that - that, once nominated, he'll move to the center on budgets, defense and health care. But that's going to be hard to do. After all, he's declared that he will repeal all of Bush's tax cuts, even for the middle class.

It looks to me as though the Dean-Gore party is stuck far to the left side of the political spectrum and that it will take Hillary Clinton, of all people, to drag it back to the center.

If you think that closing graf is hyperbole, don't take Mort's word for it ... try William Safire's:

Consider the political meaning of all this. Here is a Democrat who has no regrets for voting for the resolution empowering the president to invade Iraq; who insists repeatedly and resolutely that "failure is not an option"; who is ready to send in a substantially greater U.S. force to avert any such policy failure ? and yet whose latest poll ratings show her to be the favorite of 43 percent of Democrats, three times the nomination support given front-runner Howard Dean.

What cooks? One reason is that Hillary stands aloof, hard to get, while all the others are slavering for support. Another could be that most Democrats don't yet realize she's a hard-liner at heart. A third is that her personal appeal to liberals (and apoplectic opposition from conservatives) overwhelms all Democrats' policy differences. A fourth ? and don't noise this around ? could be that she speaks for the silent majority of centrist Democrats who yearn for the Old Third Way without Mr. Clinton.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Hillary started looking like an improvement of my party's future ... yet here we are. Ironic, because in reading Dead Center, one of the quotes that rankled me the most came from a White House strategy session in which Hillary was basically quoted as saying to hell with the south (primarily, white male southern bubbas). I believe the exact quote was something like "F*ck them." Rather aggravating as one of those southern Dems that thinks it folly to watch a major national party write off the single largest region of the nation.

But that quote was from an earlier, more heady, time for Hillary. She's since been chastened by her HillaryCare experience, and the question that now looms is: which is the real Hillary ... the centrist hawk or the reflexive liberal? Four more years, and we'll have to see where things stand, I suppose. Best of luck to the Deanheads on trying to find a winning combination out of 35% of the electorate, though.

ADD-ON:
Centrist Democrats Face Difficult Times

"What I can't understand is why our party won't heed the lessons of the one Democrat elected and re-elected to the White House in six decades," said Al From, founder and chief executive of the DLC.

Republicans are all too eager to criticize Dean for his stance against the war and Bush's tax cuts, and for signing a civil-unions bill during his tenure as governor - policy stands that appeal to the Democratic base.

Centrists are quick to point out that the two Democratic candidates whose campaigns were directly aimed at the party's core voters, McGovern in 1972 and Mondale in 1984, lost 49 states apiece.

After the 1984 loss, party activists such as From and key party leaders developed a strategy to move the Democratic Party toward the political center. It helped get Clinton elected twice before Gore set a more populist tone late in the 2000 race. Then came the 2004 campaign.

"The idea that you win elections in the middle is going right out the window," said James Campbell, a specialist in presidential campaigns at the University of Buffalo-SUNY. Democratic candidates like Lieberman, Dick Gephardt and - to a lesser extent - John Edwards and John Kerry, who have tried to position themselves in the political center on the war and on Bush's tax cuts, have struggled to gain traction with voters.