08/17/2002 Archived Entry: "Dean Report & the Retort"
The Daily Standard has a bit of an attack on Dean: Harebrained Howard, which castigates Dean for strongly opposing vouchers. It's been picked up by rightwing downdrafters like the WA Times and Hoosier Review. It's a thin-stretched --A is like B, B is like C, so A equals C-- article in terms of factual coverage. Amid the stretches of truth, Bockhorn quotes Stenburg, "Under this system, parents in tuitioning towns have sent their children to a variety of state-accredited public and private schools, including some religiously affiliated ones and some out-of-state, for many years." Even though a few illegal cases have occurred, since 1961, when the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that using public money to pay tuition at a parochial school violated the state constitution, public funds have not been sanctioned to be used for religiously affiliated ones. The article presents a typical maneuver in which Republicans try to frame public payment of private school tuition as a matter of parental choice. Bockhorn begins the article with Dean's opposition to vouchers; then, at the end of the article, concludes with the claim that Dean opposes school choice. In fact, Dean has said he is in favor of "empowering parents" to choose a public school of choice, but is opposed to parental choice for private or faith-based schools and charter schools.
A David Donadio writes a letter in comment to TNR's Invisible Man article on Dean: Invisible ink. Cohn refutes most of it, but one nugget that I laughed at was Donadio's statement that:
As for Dean's statewide popularity, his election margins have fallen steadily each time he has been reelected. As nice a guy as he seems to be, if he hadn't chosen to retire this year the voters of Vermont would have probably chosen for him.
We will see this sort of argument a lot. Sure, Dean won 5 elections in a row, but we were about to defeat him... or the refrain, Dean only won the last election with 51%-- leaving out that it was a 3-way race with Dean being the centrist candidate winning by 13%. In fact, Donadio's statement that Dean's election margins have fallen steadily each time he has been re-elected is barely true; still, they are nothing to scoff toward. Here were Dean's election margins: 75-23; 68-19; 71-22; 56-41; 51-38-10.
In Limitations of campaign limits, we are treated to a parody of sorts, in comparison of Vermont's campaign expenditure limitations with Communist China. The whole debate aside for a moment, Fein states: Greater candidate expenditures, predictably, are generally associated with greater voter interest, understanding, and participation. That's entirely unproved to be a general given. In fact, when the increased expenditures are for negative advertising, voter interest and participation decreases; the Houston Mayoral contest being a good recent example of this sort of campaign equation. As for campaign expenditure limitations, the jury is out still. I am skeptical as to their effectiveness, other than to limit lambaste negativity (which is a good in itself perhaps worth the measure).
