Democrats Helped Bring Down Dean

Remember the Club for Growth? That's the anti-Dean "527" political organization that ran the tv ad in Iowa saying that Howard Dean should get his "latte-drinking, Volvo-driving," etc, etc, self back to liberal Vermont where it belongs. (More here on that ad.) That was the "Club's" second ad; the first compared Dean to Mondale and Dukakis as a tax-and-spend liberal.

Those ads probably didn't help Dean's campaign too much, but they were paid for by a self-confessed Republican organization, so they weren't all that surprising. The big question was: Why were the dirtiest anti-Dean attack ads paid for by Democrats?

That's right: According to this story on NPR, monied Democrats helped take down the Dean campaign. The so-called "Americans for Jobs, Healthcare, and Progressive Values," is another "527" group, and its anti-Dean ads were far worse than those funded by Dean's Republican opponents. One of the "Americans for Jobs" ads focused on Dean's gun control positions. But the worst was the one that tried to link Dean w/Osama bin Laden. The idea seemed to be: If you vote for Dean, Osama will get you! (Here's a Windows Media version of the attack ad.) Politics don't get much dirtier than that -- especially when a (hopefully) more subtle version of this line attack will be the main argument Bush uses to try to be reelected.

Which Democrats were funding these ads? On December 16, 2003, the Washington Post connected the dots between the ads and the money:

The machinists union endorses Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). The machinists union makes a "significant" contribution to Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values (AJHPV), according to union political director Richard Michalski. The same AJHPV, a new organization, runs television ads in Iowa and elsewhere attacking former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Mr. Dean is Mr. Gephardt's leading rival for votes in the Iowa Democratic caucuses.

With us so far? Then continue: Leo Hindery, a cable television executive, is a national finance co-chair of the Gephardt campaign. Mr. Hindery is also a backer of AJHPV. The organization's chief fundraiser is a former Gephardt fundraiser, David Jones. Its president, Edward F. Feighan, a former Ohio congressman, has given the maximum $2,000 to the Gephardt campaign.

Is a picture beginning to emerge?

Did Gephardt or his campaign really have anything to do with AJHPV? We'll probably never know, and now that Geppy's out of the race, it doesn't matter all that much. Today a slightly more relevant question is: Did Kerry or his campaign have anything to do with AJHPV? Another perspective from last December:

AJHPV's new spokesman is former John Kerry press secretary Robert Gibbs, who left the Massachusetts senator's campaign when his boss, Jim Jordan, was fired. The Kerry camp also denies any connection with the 527 group. Both the Gephardt and Kerry campaigns have gone on the air with positive ads this week, leaving the Dean bashing to AJHPV.

That was December, and much has happened since then, none of which was good for the Dean campaign. Now we learn from AJHPV's recently-released records that a major donor to the group is also a prominent (and ethically-challenged) fundraiser for Kerry -- former U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli:

The website "PoliticsNJ.com" first reported that Torricelli, who abandoned his reelection bid five weeks before the 2002 election amid a fund-raising controversy, donated $50,000 in November from his leftover Senate campaign account to Americans for Jobs & Healthcare. The group ran more than $500,000 in ads against Dean this winter. One ad questioned Dean's foreign policy credentials while displaying an image of terrorist Osama bin Laden.

At the time, the group was suspected of having ties to Gephardt, the Missouri Democrat who was clashing with Dean for primacy in the caucuses. The group was run by a pair of past Gephardt supporters and had a spokesman who once worked for Kerry, but it refused to release its list of contributors. The group's executive director, David Jones, released the list Tuesday.

The Boston Globe story goes on to note that AJHPV also got money from Clark supporters, and also from at least one donor who had previously given the Dean campaign $2000. The suggestion seems to be that the group's donors supported all the candidates. That's ridiculous, considering that Torricelli gave $50k to AJHPV and is raising over $100k for Kerry, but whatever. The point is not to pin AJHPV's nastiness on Kerry or Gephardt or any other campaign, but to point out that:

1) Now that Kerry has taken over the "frontrunner" position, he isn't getting any of this kind of nasty treatment from fellow Democrats, and

2) Dean didn't lose "frontrunner" status because his campaign "imploded" or "self-destructed," he lost that status at least partly because his opponents assassinated his character and terrified voters.

Yes, I'm becoming bitter about the fact that Dean's campaign has come to this point. You can say I "blame the media" for what's happened, and you won't be wrong, but you won't be completely right, either. The media has a great deal to answer for when it comes to their coverage of the Dean campaign, but that will be for the historians to sort out. More important is why and how the DNC, the DLC and supposedly "Democratic" groups like AJHPV tried to stop Dean. And just as important and closely-related, why and how has the Dean campaign so far seemed unable to overcome or break through all of that resistance to reach the people it's been fighting for -- the voters? History will also judge all of that.

Meanwhile, the latest (and only) Zogby poll from Wisconsin shows Dean with double the support indicated by other polls. And regardless of what happens tomorrow in Wisconsin, we gotta do what we gotta do: Re-Defeat Bush.

Posted February 16, 2004 08:03 AM | election 2004