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February 18, 2005

Dean vs. Perle

Carla and I went to see new DNC Chair Howard Dean and Bush's former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle debate last night in Portland. The debate was part of the annual Tom McCall Forum which Pacific University puts on.

Carla will put up a more detailed post when she able to. For now I just wanted to post my somewhat less organized thoughts and observations on the debate.

Reportedly C-SPAN carried the debate, or so we were told when it opened up. But, I can't find anything on C-SPAN's site about it. Perhaps they're planning on showing it today or over the weekend.

WREG in Memphis has this AP piece on the debate, for those who want to see a MSM report on it.

Howard Dean was very warmly received by the audience, who payed to see the event, BTW. Richard Perle somewhat less so. I would estimate that something over 60% of the audience were solidly supportive of Dean and somewhere around 5% were similarly supportive of Perle, with the remainder less boisterous and less obviously partisan. Clearly this was a Dean-friendly crowd!

As noted in the WREG-carried AP piece, a protester disrupted Perle's opening remarks. Carla and I were on the opposite side of "the Schnitz" concert hall, which is best known as home turf for the Portland Symphony, and so our vantage point wasn't the best. The guy threw one shoe at Perle, while yelling something unintelligable to me, which missed badly... sailing well over Perle's head. He then threw his other shoe which likewise missed badly, failing to even clear the stage. He bent down to pick it up and was gang tackled by several security. Perle reacted calmly by just standing there and looking at the guy.

While I think the protester's opposition to Perle was probably shared by the large majority of the crowd, he angered most of us with his infantile tantrum which I can't imagine could possibly have been less constructive... which probably occurred to him as he tried to sleep on the concrete slab that passes for a bed in his jail cell last night. I certainly didn't lose any sleep feeling sorry for him! He certainly slept in a bed of his own making.

This morning I related the incident to my boss, who reacted much the same way I did. That then spun off into a discussion of Bush as a President and the Iraq War. My boss is a registered Republican. He said that he likes Bush personally. But, he believes firmly that the Iraq War was about Bush wanting to settle the score with Saddam for having attempted to assasinate his father, George H. W. Bush and nothing more. He utterly rejects the attempts by Bush partisans to associate anything about Iraq with what Al Queda did on 9/11 or with the wider War on Terrorism.

I was struck by how Dean clearly didn't talk like the wimpy pacifist that many NeoCons try to paint him as. One example would be Dean bringing up Iran and North Korea as having been and continuing to pose a greater security threat to the United States than Iraq. Dean focused squarely on terrorism, WMD and the potential for WMD technology spreading. As far as I could tell, Perle didn't dispute any of it.

In general Howard Dean articulated two primary areas where he disagrees with the Bush administration. One is, to borrow the old "the carrot and the stick" analogy, that the Bush administration has all but thrown the carrot away. The other criticism he offered was the lack of foresight. More to the point, the lack of apparent willingness to consider the longer-term consequences of the Bush administration's short-term foreign policy dictates such as the preemptive doctrine.

Anyway... I'm at work and have a lot to get done today. So, I'm going to leave it at this.

Check back later and Carla will have a more comprehensive review of the debate. She took copious notes while I just sat and watched.

Posted by Kevin at February 18, 2005 11:32 AM