NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY
America's Three-Ring Circus

I arrived in Los Angeles this morning for some meetings this week. A little tired from city hopping, but I'm excited about some of these meetings and also seeing some of my good friends... Will, Robert (coming back from London after doing a surgery rotation there), YG (good friend from Chicago who recently moved out here), Jimmy (friend from Korea who will most likely move back to LA, and who I wrote about a couple times), Bell, and others if I have time.

Anyway, keeping up with the New Hampshire primary made me realize that P. T. Barnum could not have created a better mix of clowns, freaks, and sideshows than the Democratic candidates are showing on this great political stage.

In the first ring, you have two overgrown babies (Kerry & Dean) crying back and forth. This recent quote by Dean cracks me up:

"One of the things John will have to learn as a front-runner is (to) stop whining when people say something different about him."

What? Excuse me? Howard, you were the one who cried and whined to DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe when the other candidates were attacking you. You told McAuliffe to get them off your back. Wow, talk about a pot calling the kettle black. Short-term memory is not a good characteristic for the president of the United States, Howard.

The second ring is occupied by Kerry alone. James Taranto (Best of the Web Today, The Wall Street Journal - January 26, 2004) and Dave Brooks (New York Times) discusses Kerry's abnormally flexible backbone (Taranto article below and link to Brooks' article):

Profiles in Courage?--I
Where does John Kerry fit on the ideological spectrum of the Democratic Party? Is he a centrist like Bill Clinton or a doctrinaire liberal in the mold of Michael Dukakis, the man he served as Massachusetts' lieutenant governor two decades ago? The answer appears to be somewhere in between. Kerry has some Clintonian instincts, but in a party dominated by left-wing interest groups, he lacks the political courage to do anything about it.

The liberation of Iraq is one example. In October 2002 he voted in favor of war. Then, faced with the rise of Howard Dean, he reinvented himself as a peacenik, even going so far as to vote, in October 2003, to defund the troops.

This is of a piece with his domestic-policy record, as laid out by the New York Times' David Brooks. "If you look back over the span of John Kerry's career, you find that every few months or years he takes a hard look at some thorny public issue," observes Brooks. "He will momentarily embrace daring ideas, but if they threaten core constituencies, he often abandons them, returning meekly to the Democratic choir. That is the difference between speechifying and leadership."

In 1992, he gave a speech challenging Democratic dogma on race. He has called for "unpopular reforms" in Social Security. And in 1998, he "took on the teachers' unions":

In twin speeches in Washington and Massachusetts, he described school systems that are "imploding upon themselves," beset with "bloated bureaucracy" and "stagnant administration." He said we had to "end tenure as we know it" so incompetent teachers could be fired more easily.

Now, however, Kerry is a staunch defender of teachers unions, which he refers to as "teachers." Yesterday the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam, told ABC-TV's George Stephanopoulos: "Yes, we need increased accountability in schools. We need to raise the standards. But you don't have to do it in a way that disrespects teachers and literally throws the baby out with the bath water, which is what they're doing today."

They're literally throwing the baby out with the bath water? Is Kerry showing off the inadequacy of his own (private) education? Or is this his latest effort to stake out a moderate position? After all, liberals usually favor partial-bath abortion.

The third ring is the freak ring with Clark all by himself. I still can't believe he said he supports abortions in any stage. Even my pro-choice friends would agree, since it's scientifically proven that even in the first trimester is life, that the third trimester is the killing of a life. Now Clark sides with that idiot Michael Moore and he can't even clearly defend his position and whether he thinks it is wrong and inaccurate to call President Bush a "deserter":

Profiles in Courage?--II
On Friday we noted that Wesley Clark, in a New Hampshire debate, had refused to renounce Michael Moore's characterization, at a rally where Moore endorsed Clark, of President Bush as a "deserter." Yesterday on "Meet the Press," host Tim Russert gave Clark several more opportunities to do so, and he once again declined:

Russert: Is it appropriate to call the president of the United States a deserter?

Clark: Well, you know, Tim, I wouldn't have used that term and I don't see the issues that way. This is an election about the future, and what's at stake in this election is the future [blah blah blah] . . .

Russert: But words are important, and as you well know under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, if you're a deserter, the punishment is death during war. Do you disassociate yourself from Michael Moore's comments about the president?

Clark: Well, I can't use those words and I don't see the issues in that way. But I will tell you this: that Michael Moore has the right to speak freely. I don't screen what people say when they're going to come up and say something like that. That's his form of dissent, and I support freedom of speech in this country, and I would not have characterized the issues in that way. I think this is an election where we have to look at the future, not at the past. And so what we're doing is we're taking the campaign to the American people [yadda yadda yadda] . . .

Russert: The right of dissent is one thing, but is there any evidence that you know of that President Bush is a deserter from the United States armed forces?

Clark: Well, I've never looked into those, Tim. I've heard those allegations. But I think this election has to turn on holding the president accountable for what he's done in office and comparing who has the better vision to take the country forward.

One might have given Clark the benefit of the doubt on Thursday; perhaps he just wasn't prepared for the question. But by Sunday morning he had had 2 1/2 days to think about it, and he gave exactly the same answer. Why would Clark act as if it's perfectly acceptable to slander the president by falsely accusing him of a crime? Probably because he's afraid that if he did the decent thing, he would lose some Angry Left votes.

As we noted in September, Gen. Hugh Shelton, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Clark had been relieved of his European assignment because of "integrity and character issues." Having watched Clark campaign, we begin to get an idea why.

Clark is an idiot. Does Michael Moore really hold that much power in the Democratic party? Among voters? I highly doubt it, so why do you care if you distance yourself from him. To the majority of America, that whole conversation is a turn off.

Objectively speaking, he could have and should have answered those questions better. As my mother would state sometimes, "I think he has low intelligence, Dear." Either this or his campaign manager sucks and he is poorly coached. Clark had so much momentum early on and a great presence. He's just tripped, shot himself in the foot, revealed himself to be awkwardly arrogant (that lieutenant comment about Kerry still cracks me up), and extremely self-centered. I'm not sure if he really wants to run for president to change the world and to make our nation better. It seems he's in it to have his name in the history books more than anything else. Either way, I still think he could have been coached better on the campaign trail, and I bet the Clinton camp of the Democratic party just threw up their arms in surrender.

Clark is a joke. All these guys have flaws that are too big. Again, I like Edwards as a candidate but the majority of his party would understandably think he is too inexperienced. Anyway, these three front-runners (Kerry, Dean, Clark) would have been signed up by old P.T. Barnum during the early days of his circus without hesitation. Maybe they should just quit this race and join the circus today.