Has Howard Dean’s ox been Gored?

By Doug Powers

Al Gore stunned a lot of people recently, and this time not simply by displaying some inflection in his voice. The former veep and presidential candidate took a break from maniacally hand counting ballots in the dark basement of a Broward County courthouse, turned off the light on his miners helmet, and announced that he would endorse Howard Dean for president.

The assumption by many that Dean’s life just got easier is highly debatable.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Howard Dean is going to be the Democratic nominee in 2004. Gephardt and Edwards are fading, Kucinich is only in it for the chicks, and if Wesley Clark does any more waffling, somebody’s going to cover him in syrup. Through all this, Joe Lieberman watched his former running mate, Gore, endorse somebody else. You have to feel bad for ol’ Joe – it’s like seeing an unattractive yet friendly bride left stranded at the altar.

The man who I thought would be the person to beat, John Kerry, is getting so slap-happy and frustrated that he can often times be seen arguing with his breakfast, and is now suffering from stress-induced bouts with Tourette Syndrome. The latter may have cost him the Gore endorsement, since they know Kerry would have had to campaign with Tipper following him around sticking parental warning labels on his head.

Howard Dean is now the frontrunner – more so thanks to the Gore endorsement – but the real question is why Gore did what he did.

Dick Morris, ex-Clinton adviser and political strategist extraordinaire, who is best known to some for playing the oral version of “this little piggy went to market” with a call girl while on the phone mumbling something to the president about Bosnia, had an interesting take on this in a recent column. Morris wrote that this is “payback time for Al Gore.”

Morris thinks that Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean is his way of, once and for all, cutting the strings with the Clintons and striking out on his own by backing what the Clintons and the Democratic Party consider to be a dangerous rogue candidate.

Could it be? Is Gore trying to shed his dependency upon Clintonian Democrats by backing a man who, heaven forbid, won’t take federal matching funds and bow toward the DNC coffers, kissing the feet of Bill and Hillary while he’s down there?

Morris certainly has a good point, but another possible scenario is that Gore has been sent to slap Dean back into line. If Gore hasn’t been sent, then he’s doing it on his own out of Pavlovian response to his masters’ whims. Either way, the goal may be to get Dean back into DNC lockstep.

Being a marionette of the Clintons has a nasty career drawback for a politician like Gore. He knows that if he cuts the strings, he falls out of view – and there is no way Al Gore is ready to drop out of this puppet show.

Perhaps Al Gore is simply a wakeup call, albeit a monotone one, for the Democratic front-runner, courtesy of the DNC Dons. The argument that Gore is distancing himself from the Clintons is ludicrous at best, especially when you consider that the first campaign event Dean and Gore appeared at together was in Harlem. This is just a stone’s throw from Bubba’s office, where it seems like only yesterday Harlem residents were shaking their heads and muttering “there goes the neighborhood” as Clinton’s U-Haul filled with stolen White House office supplies backed up to the building.

“Distancing himself from the Clintons”? Gore couldn’t get closer to Bill Clinton if he disguised himself as a sexy bag of pork rinds and mailed himself to Chappaqua.

This time, the message to Dean is nice and polite. Like being in an airport and hearing a pleasant voice on the public-address system announce, “Howard Dean, white courtesy phone,” the doctor and former Vermont governor is being sent a message through Gore. If he refuses to pick up the phone and respond, they’ll have to resort to Plan B.

What’s “Plan B”? For many in this field of Democratic candidates, simply threatening to release photos of them being caught in a compromising position with integrity would be enough to bring them back into the fold, but more may be required to get Howard Dean to play ball.

As for right now, the Gore endorsement has given the Dean campaign a boost, and bought it some time – since everyone is currently preoccupied with helping Joe Lieberman get the knife out of his back.

Doug Powers

Doug Powers' columns appear every Monday on WorldNetDaily. He is an author and columnist residing in Michigan. Be sure to check out Doug's blog for daily commentary and responses to select reader e-mail.

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