Thursday, 29 January 2004

Brother Souljah. I've written before about how President Bush has missed opportunities that a better politician would have recognized—so, in the spirit of fair play, here's one that Howard Dean missed: He should have smacked down Al Sharpton in the pre-Iowa debate. Sharpton had attacked Dean for not having a person of color in his cabinet during his term of office as Vermont governor, conveniently ignoring details like Vermont's population (97% white) and the size of Dean's cabinet (five). But a politician can't hide behind facts and figures on a personal issue like this one, because the resulting response sounds too much like the classic racist's lament: I'd like to hire more people of color, really I would, but I just couldn't find any qualified candidates. Oh darn.

Dean is usually fast on his feet, but for this challenge he didn't come up with a good response: He simply replied with a soft "no," which avoided the trap of making excuses but failed to deflect the attack. The slam-dunk response was: "No, but if that's how you measure a person's commitment to diversity, then George W. Bush is your candidate. Bush has more African-Americans in his cabinet than I ever had in Vermont—but my support for diversity is more than skin deep," etc., and then segue into a list of diversity-related Dean achievements. It would have been a two-fer attack on Shartpon and Bush that ended on a Dean high note, reminded pundits of Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment in '92, and gave Dean leverage to expand his appeal to the center—which is exactly what he needed (and still needs) to do.

Instead, Dean now faces the more difficult task, especially in this shortened primary season, of broadening his support base while laboring in Kerry's shadow. If he'd played to the center while the spotlight was still on him, it would have paid more dividends: Maybe not enough to counter the five-on-one mugging that Dean received in Iowa, but perhaps enough to make a difference in New Hampshire and the February states. It's way too early to roll out Dean's political obituary (which, if it ever gets written, will not suffer from a lack of co-authors), but his road to the nomination is now steeper than it could have been.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:48 am. comments.