The Beatable Bush

Yesterday, Kerry spokesman David Wade said: "I hope John Edwards won't try to invent a distinction without a difference, but voters are smart, they know that both John Kerry and John Edwards will fight to include labor and environmental provisions in our trade agreements. Both John Kerry and John Edwards voted for trade with China and both would enforce the protections Bill Clinton negotiated that George Bush ignores. John Edwards talks about NAFTA, but he wasn't in the Senate when it was passed, said nothing at the time and can't point to a declarative statement against it when he ran for the Senate. After running a good campaign, you'd hate to see him reinvent himself as a single issue candidate campaigning on a single issue he's never said much about."

Journalists and pundits are too quick to use the term "negative attack" to describe legitimate differences of opinion among candidates. It is completely legitimate to point out policy differences. But Edwards, who has mostly run an impeccably upbeat campaign, might be walking a fine line here.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. And I gave the Edwards campaign ample opportunity to give it. But I hadn't heard back from them by my deadline.

Who Killed Dean?

Was the Howard Dean flameout a result of self-immolation or a nasty case of intraparty fratricide? There's plenty of evidence that both factors played a role. (The Deaniacs would add that the baddies in the media didn't help things either.)

Dean did himself no favors by often appearing unprepared and contradicting himself on important issues and repeatedly having to apologize for mistakes on the campaign trail.

On the other hand, one of my most astonishing memories of Iowa is of a "major" speech by Gephardt in the tiny town of Nevada. Two pages of the five-page speech I received beforehand were a screed against Dean. Gephardt spent more time talking about what was wrong with Dean than what was right with Gephardt, damaging both in the process.

I also vividly recall Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who wasn't even campaigning in Iowa, making his way to a debate there seemingly for no other reason than to throw rhetorical body blows at Dean.

A report in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday adds a few details to an old story covered in The Washington Post and elsewhere about how a group of Democrats conspired to damage Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire

The writer, Lynn Sweet, described it as "the first demonstration of how a political group can attack working under the new McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Jones collected $663,000 from the 26 donors in the last quarter of 2003 and was able -- with some luck in timing -- to irrevocably wound Dean's $42 million campaign fueled by thousands and thousands of small contributors."