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Dean Gets Kiss Of Death
By Tim Siggia
July 26, 2003
Just about the time when things started looking good for Vermont governor Howard Dean, his 15 minutes of fame seem to be going down in flames. The Democratic presidential hopeful who was leading the pack in New Hampshire only a week ago seems to be on a downward spiral according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, which puts Sleepy Joe Lieberman at the top of the heap with 21 percent of respondents choosing him as their favorite candidate. Following Sleepy Joe are Richard Gephardt at 16 percent, John Kerry at 13 percent, and finally, Howard Dean as fourth choice with 10 percent of the vote.
As if this were not enough to put Dean out of the running, the coup-de-grace to his campaign came in the form of an endorsement from that jolly old soul who gave us the state income tax: Liberal Lowell Weicker. The rest of the country may dimly remember Weicker as the renegade Republican senator who leaped at the chance to put the knife in the back of President Richard Nixon back in the Watergate days. But in Connecticut people's memories of Weicker are still all too fresh.
The media are treating as big news the fact that Liberal Lowell is planning to endorse a Democratic candidate. It shouldn't be considered so. Anybody who knows anything about Liberal Lowell -- and just about everyone in Connecticut does -- knows that he not only has never been a Republican at heart, but loathes and despises everything his former party stands for. Indeed, Weicker was the prototype RINO long before the acronym came into general usage. Not only did Weicker warm the cockles of every liberal heart by saddling Connecticut with The Tax, but he also embarrassed his constituents with his too-frequent call-ins to "Imus In The Morning" on the New York AM radio station WFAN, where he never let a chance go by to remind listeners that he was the governor of Connecticut. Even more bombastic was his publicity stunt in which he arranged with host Don Imus to trade jobs for a day, making himself the guest host of "Imus In The Morning" and Don Imus the temporary governor of Connecticut. (In retrospect, Connecticut may have gotten the better of that deal.)
As if that were not enough, Liberal Lowell, a self-described "moderate", showed his true colors by making Connecticut the only state in the nation not to observe National Prayer Day. Though it certainly outraged clergy of all denominations, Weicker's move no doubt overjoyed liberals throughout the nation. God, after all, has never gotten the liberal vote, and never will.
Liberal Lowell recently appeared as a guest co-host of the liberal-oriented "Bruce And Colin Show" on WTIC-AM, filling in for the vacationing Bruce Stevens. On that show, Weicker took the opportunity to denounce President Bush in the strongest of terms, calling him, among other things, "certainly the worst president of my lifetime", citing the war in Iraq and the economic recession which began in the last year of Clinton's presidency as examples of Bush's supposed incompetence. Considering the source, such condemnation can only help President Bush in his re-election bid.
Not only did Weicker unsurprisingly endorse a Democratic candidate, but he bypassed his own state's Sleepy Joe to cast his lot with Howard Dean. Many will see this, of course, as a sort of payback to Lieberman for unseating him from his Senate seat in 1988. But those who know Liberal Lowell will quickly realize this to be only a secondary consideration. More important is the fact that Lieberman is seen in this race as being either the centerist or -- astoundingly enough -- the conservative candidate in this race, depending on who you ask, mostly because of his hawkishness on the war in Iraq. Support of gay rights and abortion on demand, and opposition to the Flag Protection Amendment, are hardly centerist, let alone conservative, positions, but then we must remember we're talking about Democrats.
Of those candidates being seriously considered, Dean is by far the farthest to the left, and therein the real reason for the Weicker endorsement. Rest assured that if either the Reverend Al Sharpton or former Illinois senator Carol Mosely Braun had a serious chance of being nominated, one of them would certainly have the Weicker endorsement. And, if this latest Quinnipiac poll is accurate, Her Royal Most Imperial Majesty, with 48 percent of respondents saying they would vote for her if she were a candidate, would get the nomination with or without Weicker's support.
Liberal Lowell's endorsement will mean little if anything to anyone outside Connecticut. In national terms he was seen mainly as a sort of curiosity, a senator-turned-governor on a ticket of his own making. In Connecticut, he has few admirers other than Colin McEnroe and the editorial staff of The Hartford Courant, and his endorsement just may result in voters here sending Dean to join Sharpton and Mosely Braun in the list of Democratic presidential also-rans.
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