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FINE PRINT

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has taken a 38 to 17 percent lead over Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry in a Zogby Poll of likely voters in next January’s New Hampshire primary. This makes Dean the Democratic Party’s presidential frontrunner. Don’t look so surprised.

For quite some time now, folks on both sides of the political aisle have tried painting Dean as an unelectable goof. Republicans, for example, have sized up his chances against George W. Bush and basically said “bring ‘em on.” Establishment Democrats seem to agree: Dean’s policies lean too far Left to connect with Middle America. Yet most polls show Dean running neck-and-neck with the blue-collar golden boy, Dick Gephardt, for the lead in Iowa’s caucus. If Gephardt is to Iowa what Kerry is to New Hampshire, and if Dean’s surging against both men, then it’s clear he’s got the momentum as well as the grassroots support to go all the way. Not only is the nomination Dean’s to lose, but it ought to be obvious to the Bush team that this sacrificial lamb is no slouch.

Joe Lieberman’s fond of saying no Democrat can win the presidency without being strong on national security. That may well be, but it’s contingent upon two contradictory things: (1) That Americans will make homeland defense a priority come November ‘04; and (2) That Americans will decide Bush isn’t tough enough. Having toppled both Mullah Omar’s Taliban and Saddam’s Baath Party—the second in spite of world opinion—it’s hard to imagine Americans voting Bush out of office if, indeed, they view the War on Terror as Issue No. 1. After all, even Democrats like Lieberman—who supported the Second Gulf War—haven’t got Bush’s hands-on, day-to-day know-how.

The real question, then, won’t be whether our current commander-in-chief has the chutzpah for this conflict, but rather whether chutzpah is what we want at all.

Establishment Democrats can go on and on about the economy if they’d like—no one will deny its importance—but it’s clear which issue has defined America since September 11, 2001, and that’s the War on Terror in all its forms. Whether you agree with Dean’s anti-war stance or not, he’s clearly the only candidate to have figured this out.

What we saw earlier this year was the defining of two very real factions: Those Americans who were willing to fight back and those who weren’t. Some in the first group wanted revenge, while some wanted just to feel safe again—whatever the reasons may be, these Americans accepted the fact that winning a war means going to war, and they’ve supported Bush accordingly. The second group, on the other hand—whether they oppose Bush, Bush’s war, war in general, or simply America—likewise identify with Dean. He’s the only guy who understands what makes the anti-war movement tick. He hears his people. His people hear him.

He’s an energetic man, Dean. He gets out there, gets sweaty, and gets tough. Peace, for him, is something worth fighting for, and he’s the only Democrat with the tenacity to do so. Kerry and Gephardt couldn’t do it. John Edwards, Bob Graham, and Wesley Clark couldn’t do it, either. These men don’t appear to believe what they’re preaching; Dean does. The man’s on fire, and he makes his opponents look like wax museum rejects by comparison—which is to say they can’t hold a candle to him, or else they’ll get burned.

And that’s why the DNC’s apparent Deanophobia is astounding.

They’ve got to get over Kerry already. If they want to win back the White House, the chosen one’s not the one to do it. Kerry’s a lot like Bob Dole, except without the sense of humor. He looks good in a suit, I guess, but he hasn’t got enough stage presence to fake the fury that so naturally comes to Dean. No one does. There’s a reason why Kerry, and Lieberman and Gephardt, aren’t appearing on a landslide of newsmagazine covers, and that’s because they don’t have Dean’s charm. Some voters will love him, and some will love to hate him, but both the DNC and RNC would do well to notice how quickly—and vividly—this man’s captured American minds.

It’s foolish for Democrats to hope against hope that Dean fizzles. In a two-party system where the two major parties all too often act as one, Dean stands poised to do America a favor. After all we’ve been through since terror struck two years ago, and with all the exhausting brouhaha building up to the Second Gulf War, Americans deserve a bona fide hawk and dove on stage at the presidential debates next year. Having hit the streets both for and against Bush’s policies this past winter, Americans ought to have this chance to come inside, sit down on a nice comfy couch, and watch as the default figureheads of the pro- and anti-war movements duke it out on the defining issue of our time.

Is Bush beatable? Sure. Every president is. That’s not the point here. What matters most is America’s confidence in him. He’s reviled in many corners of the world, this much we know, but what do Americans think? Beyond the flimsy, ever-fluctuating opinion polls, what’s America’s real stance on the Bush Doctrine? Do we or don’t we agree that national security—and his brand of it—trumps all?

If Republicans and Democrats are so confident in their positions—the former in favor of Bush, the latter opposed—then both will welcome a rigorous debate of the War on Terror on national TV. None of this wishy-washy, sometimes-for-it/sometimes-against-it stuff we’ve seen from the likes of Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Just an honest, open debate between the man who knows the most about this war and the man who most opposes it: Bush and Dean, mano-a-mano, to let us know just where America stands.

The world’s a dangerous place these days. We’ve installed a friendly government in Afghanistan, but Taliban remnants threaten stability. Neighbors like Pakistan and India also remain in constant turmoil. North Korea, meanwhile, is threatening to test its nukes, while Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia pose threats that grow larger by the day.

With Saddam Hussein gone but not quite forgotten, Iraq, too, takes the shape of a question mark on a map of the Middle East. Can we or can’t we establish peace there? What’s it going to take? How many American soldiers will die? One thing we know for sure: Iraq has become our coalition’s home base in the War on Terror, and our presence there has brought many a madman out of the woodwork. A Jordanian embassy bombing last month killed 19, a truck bomb at the UN’s Baghdad headquarters killed another 23, and an explosion at an Iraqi mosque the other day ended at least 85 lives. The terrorists—al-Qaeda and otherwise—are ramping up their efforts to thwart our war.

And that’s to say nothing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a threat which may never fade.

These are the things an American president will be dealing with in the coming years. Whether it’s Bush, Dean, or someone else entirely, these problems have festered since at least the late ‘70s, and they’re unlikely to just go away. But the decision to fight is in our hands. Come November of next year, we’ll go to the voting booths and decide—if not once and for all, then at least for four years—how tough we want to be. We can vote for Bush and rest assured that we won’t shrink away from our troubles, or we can vote for a guy like Dean and rest assured that, if nothing else, at least Liberia will be secure.

But then that’s the beauty of democracy, isn’t it? And I, for one, can’t wait to see the dynamic of Bush vs. Dean take form.

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