Blog For Arizona

Weasely Wesley and Derring-Do Dean

I gotta admit, I'm sympathetic to Wes. I genuinely like his style and I was excited when it looked like there might be an early Dean/Clark ticket emerging. But I'm begining to be relieved that he didn't accept and decided to run on his own. Wesley is going to have to work out his own positions and take his lumps on his own dime.

And the first day of Wesley's campaign certainly qualifies as lumpy. His gaffes with the press and wild gyrations in public trying to figure out what he really stands for are frankly embarrassing. Whoever thought to put an untested candidate in an airplane full of tough reporters completely on the record deserves the boot. The General needs to stop shooting from the hip and start talking from a script - he hasn't the experience to wing it. The result of his first media impression as a candidate is a vacillating diletante who doesn't even know his own mind.

The media's focus on Wesley at this point is both predictable, and given his demonstrated penchant for vacillation and flip-flopping, harmful to his campaign. The Clark folk need to go to ground and avoid media while Wesley gets the hang of keeping his mouth shut until he's ready to say something useful. A good deal of today's Note is devoted to Wesley's exploits and the press likely will remain obsessed with him for some time. I must say, the most surprising revelation of the day is Wesley's admission that he had voted for Nixon and Regan. This reinforces in my mind the fact that Wesley isn't really a Democrat at all. The party is just a convenience to him, not his home team. I certainly haven't any problem with independent voters, but I don't care for one running for President on the Democratic ticket.

Speaking of teams, our man Dean is bringing out the bat again for the end of the quarter fund-raising push. Look for Dean to clear 10 million this quarter with ease. And speaking of fund-raising pushes, we are encouraging readers to donate to Dean's campaign on the side bar.

An interesting feature of the end of quarter drive is a Dr. Dean's National House Call. The campaign is encouraging people to host house parties on September 29th and sign up for participation in a giant conferrence call. Trippi is organizing the effort to get the call into the Guiness Book. Details and registration are available here. Even if you just have a few friends or family and are raising just a little money, sign up and put Dean in the Guiness.

Another features of the September to Remember drive is Dean Visibility Day, which is today. Many of our bloggers will be participating in Visibility Events. I encourage all of them to report in on their efforts as soon as possible. Also I invite any of our readers participating in Visibility events to email me with your reports at MBryan@aol.com, or to post them in the comments thread of this post.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 9/20/2003 12:26:00 PM