TNR Primary: Dean Lite? mmm more fresh waffles!!!

[DJcairo]

I always thought Howard Dean was politically stupid to propose repealing every cent of the Bush tax cuts. Bush's strategy was to graft a small middle-class tax cut onto a huge upper-class tax cut and pretend the latter part didn't exist. Why walk into his trap by fighting that, rather than conceding it and fighting the really noxious part? Still, I gave Dean credit for political courage.

Now Dean seems to be backing away from that stance. As the Associated Press reported yesterday: "At a campaign stop, Dean made his now familiar call for repealing President Bush's tax cuts--but with the unfamiliar qualifier 'some.' Answering a question about foreign aid, Dean said he would continue it, 'but I do plan to get rid of some of the tax cuts to (former Enron Corp. chief) Ken Lay and the boys.'" Perhaps now that Dean sees he has a chance to win the nomination, he's getting wise to the general-election trap that awaits him for wanting to raise taxes on the middel class. But where does that leave his campaign? Remember, Dean has spent months flaying his primary opponents for being in favor of any tax cuts at all: "What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting tax cuts," he likes to say. Now it looks like Dean favors the same thing. Will he take back all that demagoguery about "Bush lite"? Don't count on it.

http://www.tnr.com/primary/index.mhtml?pid=738

[virtualobserver]

1. boring n/t

[KaraokeKarlton]

2. He's been saying this all along

He'd repeal all the income tax cuts, but there was one tax where the money was getting taxed twice. I can't recall exactly which tax it was, but I heard him talk about it a long time ago. Dean has also been saying all along that he wants to make taxes more fair for the middle class after getting rid of the mess Bush made. Also, it's kind of silly for Kerry (or anyone) to whine about Dean's position on the tax cuts seeing as most of them aren't even permanent and will start phasing out starting in 2005 anyway, regardless of who gets elected.

[DJcairo]

3. Umm...yea...ok...First off

This article wasn't written by Kerry, Second of all...Dean wants to a)get rid of all teh tax cuts b) give tax cuts to the middle class.

That won't work. You can't tell people. Ok, I raising your tax bill and in 6 months I'm going to lower it again. Come on. What a disaster.

[deutsey]

7. As if the tax cuts themselves aren't a disaster?

I know people in local government who tell me the clean up for the snowstorms that shut our town down last year were paid for mostly by the local government. In the past, they could count on funds from Washington, but this time they only got a fraction of what they normally got. That's only going to get worse, in my opinion. More and more of the burden for things like that is going to fall on already cash-strapped state and local governments because the federal level won't have the resources to allocate. This will (and has) resulted in lots of local services being cut and people (like my mother) being laid off from state jobs.

[Nicholas_J]

14. Yeah he has to reverse slowly on this one

AS this is the next to the last flip flop he can pull without having reversed EVERY position he had at the start of his campaign.

The media will flay him alive anyway, so why he is bothering is beyond me.

ALl that is necessary is for his to state that he would have signed the October Resolution and Dean will have flip flopped on every major campaign platform in less than one year.

[blm]

8. But, it didn't bother you that Dean whined about the others

for months and misrepresented them by telling his audiences they supported Bush's taxcuts for the wealthiest when NONE of them did.

[MercutioATC]

9. Show me a quote where Dean said that...

He made a general statements about ALL Democrats and the state of the party as a whole when he said that "We're not going to beat Bush by Being Bush-lite" and "We're not going to beat Bush by voting for the Bush tax cuts".

He's campaigning as a candidate who wants to change the tone of the entire party. In support of that, he's going to address what he feels is wrong with the way the party has been behaving.

[blm]

13. "those four guys from Congress..." is specific

and you know it. Dean was purposely misleading his audience. I'm sure he was just showing how much he respected them.


http://www.cmonitor.com/stories/news/local2003/012303dean_2002.shtml
>>>>>
I can't wait for those four guys from Congress to come up here and explain to us why they wanted to raise your property taxes after they supported a tax cut for the wealthiest people in America," he said.

Dean also criticized his opponents for voting to give Bush a "blank check" on military intervention in Iraq - and, now, changing their tune on the issue.

"Today, they're running around telling you folks they're all anti-war," he said. (Later, he acknowledged that Lieberman's vote was consistent with the senator's comparatively "hawkish" position on Iraq.) "We're never going to elect a president that does those things. If I voted for the Iraq resolution, I'd be standing in favor, supporting it right now in front of you."

Dean said he would have voted instead for the Biden-Lugar resolution, which he said supported disarming Saddam using multilateral action, and which did not call for a "regime change."
>>>>>>

[dsc]

4. Of course no original quote

and no state given. I can't even track the quote down since AP requires one to know which state an event happens in for one to be able to find it on their site. Journalists must be the most lazy incompetent group of people on the planet.

[liberalnurse]

5. Nothing but redundent bashing

by the same old Flame-Master.......so predictable....


Impotent and lame. Anti-democtatic party.


"Who let the dogs out?????????

[clar]

6. Eric, seeing as your sole purpose in life

seems to be bashing Dean here, on the Kerry Blog, on the Dean Blog, on Blogs you created and I'm sure, elsewhere, what are you going to do if Dean gets the nomination? Will you put some of your impressive energy into supporting him, and helping get bush out? Will you vote for him?
Just curious.

[DJcairo]

10. No true--All i've done is post a story from a magazine.

If you have a beef with the story don't complain to me, complain to TNR. Further more, while I do support Kerry, I have lots of stuff about Kerry and why I support him at my website toughenough.org and have posted similarly positive things on teh Dean blog.

Deaniacs, after months of ridiculing just about any other candidate, would prefer to take teh hiugh road now that their guy is the frontrunner. Well, politics is politics and I understand the setiment. But claiming that anything negative said about Dean is an attack on the Dem party is the same thinking that Bush uses when he says a political attack on him is unpatriotic. Get over yourself.

[clar]

12. Baloney

That line about how all you've done is post a story. You search out the most negative articles you can and post them. Some from disreputable sources. The only thing that saves you from being a pure unadulterated basher is that you sometimes post positive things about your candidate.

And I, my friend? I've never ridiculed anyone. I've defended all the candidates. I don't bash them. And I have no intention of getting over myself. I'm clearly the cats meow. Meow.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

11. I can't speak for Eric, whoever he is

but just because someone finds Dean's dishonesty, duplicity and demagoguery upalatable doesn't mean they aren't a Democrat and won't vote for the Democratic nominee no matter who it is. I vote for Max Baucus everytime he runs and even have volunteered for his campaign - but if he were in a primary against a credible opponent I would be the first one to speak up about some of the votes he's taken.

The bottom line is, this is the primaries. We owe it to ourselves to pick the best nominee possible. Is that someone who shifts their positions like a weather vane, depending on which way the wind is blowing? That is the topic of this thread.

[Duder]

15. Dean acknowledges slip - Kerry still Bush lite

'At a campaign stop, Dean made his now familiar call for repealing President Bush’s tax cuts - but with the unfamiliar qualifier "some."

Answering a question about foreign aid, Dean said he would continue it, "but I do plan to get rid of some of the tax cuts to (former Enron Corp. chief) Ken Lay and the boys."

When a reporter asked whether Dean was softening his oft-repeated pledge to repeal all of the Bush tax cuts, Dean said he wasn’t.

"That was a slip of the tongue; it’s going to happen unless you read from a script," he said. "I have consistently said we are going to take away all of the Bush tax cuts because the middle class never did get any serious benefit."'

http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/09192003/news/50870.htm

'But Kerry's latest attack on Dean, in which the senator calls out his opponent for wanting to raise middle-class taxes by "thousands of dollars," isn't reasonable. For one thing, Kerry has spent the last several months inflating the amount of money saved by the average middle-class family. In July, he told the Capital Report that by voting for the package, the Senate put "about 750 bucks into the pocket of an individual, $1,500 into a married couple." But in September, he told CBS's "The Early Show" that "those candidates who are saying get rid of the whole tax cut are gonna raise the tax bill for the average family in America about $2,000." And now, he's highlighting a New Hampshire family--Barrington's Ted Walsh and Maya Glos--who could see their taxes raised $3,000 under Dean's plan.

Such an inflationary tendency is hardly comforting. But it's the last number that's really irksome to see coming from a Democratic candidate. As Paul Krugman noted in his magisterial anti-tax cut article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Bush was able to claim huge middle-class savings under his latest plan by constructing hypothetical "sweet spot" families who met the demographic conditions--two kids under 18, a $40,000 income, etc.--to avail themselves of all the various tax cuts, even when the vast majority of the middle class would, individually, see only some of those benefits. Indeed, though Bush promoted these families as "average Americans," Krugman notes that "about half of American families received a tax cut of less than $100; the great majority, a tax cut of less than $500." Nor did they do much better under the first round of Bush tax cuts, as Krugman also points out: "Last year, the actual tax break for families in the middle of the income distribution averaged $469, not $1,600." Which in turn should make us all wonder where Kerry is getting his numbers.

Which isn't to say that Kerry is fibbing--there's every possibility that Ted and Maya would see their taxes go up under Dean. But clearly not everyone will be as unlucky as Ted and Maya. Nor is it wrong to argue for keeping some of those cuts. But by using his changing numbers, Kerry is simply borrowing a page from the playbook of the man he'd like to unseat--and in any case the last thing this country needs is another president willing to finagle numbers for political gain.'

http://www.tnr.com/primary/index.mhtml?pid=736

[dsc]

16. Gee does this point sound familiar

I didn't realize how much the inflation had actually risen but otherwise this is just what I said.