Dean's Role Is Redefined by Gore's Endorsement

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=68&ncid=716&e=17&u=/nyt/20031210/ts_nyt/deansroleisredefinedbygoresendorsement

Dean's Role Is Redefined by Gore's Endorsement

By R. W. APPLE Jr. The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 Al Gore endorsement confirms the status of Howard Dean as that rarest of animals in the jungle of presidential nominating politics: an insurgent front-runner. It gives him the legitimacy he has been seeking, but it also presents him with problems of self-definition. <snip>

But contradictions will trail Dr. Dean as he jets around the country with just six weeks left before the first big test. Is he an outsider still, or is he an insider? On tour last weekend, he sometimes sounded like both in the same day. Now he is the anointed candidate of the vice president in an administration whose policies, he has been suggesting for months, helped to turn many Dean supporters into nonvoters. <snip>


As more and more voters learn about Dr. Dean, they will inevitably ask who he is, what he believes and what events have shaped his views and character. Is he a liberal, as his passionate young supporters believe, and as his relentless criticism of the war in Iraq implies, who can flank primary opponents to the left? Or is he more of a centrist, as he said in the South over the weekend, who can appeal to general-election voting blocs that have seemed highly antagonistic to each other? What to make of his record in Vermont, where he combined liberalism on abortion with conservatism on gun control? <snip>


Dr. Dean's campaign runs in substantial part on union manpower. In Florida, union members not the political neophytes Dr. Dean often speaks of drove the vehicles in his motorcades, filled out his crowds and waved his placards. <snip>

[wtmusic]

1. dupe

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=108&topic_id=98916