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Doug Gamble- Contributor

Doug Gamble is a former writer for President Ronald Reagan and resides in Carmel. [go to Gamble index]

State May Make Or Break Dean
As in the 2000 primary, Democratic voters here are likely to play a decisive role
[Doug Gamble] 1/8/04

Football's Super Bowl may be set for Houston the first Sunday in February, but what is shaping up as the primary season's political super bowl will be played in California on March 2.

Not only will voters choose a Republican to face off against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and turn thumbs up or down on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's $15 billion bond and spending limit initiatives, but this state may well decide who wins the Democratic nomination for president. Although voters go to the polls in nine other states the same day, the 370 convention delegates up for grabs here are far and away the biggest single political prize in the run-up to November's presidential election.

In 2000, the results of the Republican and Democratic California primaries settled matters for good, with both George W. Bush challenger John McCain and Al Gore opponent Bill Bradley dropping out of the race shortly after going down to defeat in the Golden State. With at least two and possibly three Democratic presidential hopefuls still standing by March 2, California could again deliver a knockout blow.

Assuming Howard Dean remains the front-runner but falls short of clinching the nomination following primaries in Hawaii, Idaho and Utah on Feb. 24, California voters could either propel him to the nomination or run him off the road a week later. By the time of our primary, a single stop-Dean candidate may have emerged from the pack, probably Dick Gephardt or Wesley Clark, producing a bare-knuckles, mano-a-mano showdown.

While he still has to be presumed the favorite, the inevitability of a Dean nomination may be in doubt because of the increasingly reckless comments and bizarre behavior of the former Vermont governor, producing high anxiety among many Democrats and causing some voters to have second thoughts. It will be fascinating to see how Democrats in a state known for more than its share of flakes and nuts judge a candidate who makes even some kooky Californians look like Donald Rumsfeld.

While he bears an unfortunate facial resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald, the personality of the volatile, thinskinned Dean more and more approximates that of Capt. Queeg of The Caine Mutiny fame. As he bleats about criticism from fellow Democrats - someone should have told him that's what happens in primary campaigns - one almost expects to see him roll ball bearings around in his hand and demand to know who stole his strawberries.

And perhaps never in recent times has the Democratic Party produced a candidate who appears to represent such a threat to national security, the likely key issue in November. It is one thing for Dean to cozy up to the wacky theory that Bush may have known about 9/11 in advance and did nothing about it, and to dismiss the capture of Saddam Hussein as insignificant, but one specific remark disqualifies him from national leadership in this era of constant peril.

Dean's comment that he refuses to prejudge Osama bin Laden without facts being laid out in a trial, despite bin Laden boasting about his role in 9/11, is the most revelatory statement of his candidacy so far. It exposes that as president he would have done nothing militarily in response to 9/11 and that terrorists could count on inaction from a President Dean in the future. If he is prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the world's No. 1 terrorist when that terrorist himself has removed all doubt, it's unlikely any future attack against the U.S. would meet Dean's impossibly high threshold justifying retaliation.

I hope California Democrats who have been Dean backers up until now will consider whether they really want to support a self-absorbed, angry, petulant, possibly unbalanced rabble-rouser who refuses to acknowledge the role played by a terrorist mastermind in the slaughter of thousands of innocent American civilians. In the words of the Jack Nicholson character in the movie As Good As It Gets, "Sell crazy somewhere else. We're all stocked up here."

Copyright 2004 Doug Gamble

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