washington | Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean wasn’t the first national politician to step into a pro-Israel hornet’s nest and he won’t be the last, but that’s little solace for the badly stung candidate.
This week the surprise front-runner in the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, attacked by his rivals in the nomination fight and Democratic leaders in Congress, is scrambling to contain the fallout from his ill-chosen words about the U.S.-Israel relationship, but he threw new fuel on the controversy with his follow-up comments elevating Hamas terrorists to the status of “soldiers.”
Dean’s opponents say his words reflected a strategy aimed at left-leaning Democrats who are unsympathetic to Israel. A likelier explanation is that they represented cascading blunders and insensitivity to an important constituency.
At the very least, they say something disturbing about Dean’s political acumen — something he’ll need in abundance if he hopes to defeat the well-financed, well-oiled Bush re-election machine.
The Dean fracas started two weeks ago at a New Mexico coffee shop. In response to a question, the candidate suggested that Washington should “not take sides” in the Arab-Israeli dispute.
That phrase touched a raw nerve in the pro-Israel world, where blanket, bi-partisan support for the “special” U.S.-Israel relationship has become so routine that any slight deviation sets alarms jangling.
His off-the-cuff comments provided a big opening for Dean’s increasingly desperate rivals for the Democratic nomination.
And Republican strategists, who have been aggressively seeking Jewish campaign money by portraying President Bush as the most pro-Israel president ever, wasted no time advertising Dean’s sins.
Despite accusations that his campaign is pandering to the party’s far left, it is unclear what the candidate was really trying to do in the New Mexico coffee shop.
If he was, in fact, advocating a fundamental change in policy toward Israel, it would be a disturbing turn in an election in which the U.S.-Israeli relationship has not been an issue and in which the pro-Israel consensus has been bipartisan.
Dean may have felt he could get away with offending pro-Israel leaders because he is eschewing traditional Democratic big givers — including those whose support is based heavily on Israel-related issues — in favor of an innovative online fund-raising effort.
But it’s hard to see what Dean stands to gain by offending pro-Israel Democrats.
Despite Republican charges, the segment of the Democratic party coolest to Israel isn’t that big or that influential. And Dean is likely to win that bloc anyway; why jump into the shark-infested waters of Mideast politics when his campaign is gaining momentum across the Democratic spectrum?
Long term, such a strategy is even harder to understand. If he wins the nomination, nickel-and-dime fund-raising won’t mean much in the race against an incumbent with a record war chest. He will need the big donors who have been the financial backbone of the Democratic party for years, including pro-Israel givers.
If Dean’s remark was just a case of foot-in-mouth disease, he didn’t learn much from his mistake, as his follow-up comments about Hamas demonstrated. It didn’t matter that he was actually defending Israel’s rights to attack Hamas leaders; with a single word — “soldiers,” not terrorists — he provided endless material for both Democratic and Republican opponents vying for Jewish votes.