Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Lesson one from Meet the Press, there's no longer any doubt - Howard Dean is running for DNC Chair.

I think John [Kerry] ran a pretty good campaign. In fact, from a grassroots perspective, we ran the best campaign that we ever have; it just wasn't good enough. It's one of the reasons I'm interested in the DNC chairmanship.

Surprising comment:"My view for a long time has been that this is a terrible mess, and the best we can do is try to get out of there with some reasonable semblance of stability in Iraq. And we can't do that immediately. I actually support the president on the idea of having these elections on January 30th. I don't think there's any good time to have an election."

Perhaps Dean's smartest comment: "As I said earlier, we ran the best grassroots campaign that I've seen in my lifetime. The [GOP] ran a better one. Why? Because we sent 14,000 people into Ohio from elsewhere. They had 14,000 from Ohio talking to their neighbors and that's how you win in rural states and in rural America. If we don't do those things, we aren't going to win. We have to learn to do those things.

A vaguely Sistah Souljah moment: (Asked about the MoveOn.org memo stating, "Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back") Look, Move On has a lot of people who are in the same kind of political area as a lot of our folks at Democracy for America, and Move On was very, very helpful during the election, and grassroots politics is where it is. But to say that any faction of the Democratic Party owns it and bought it and so forth, I think, is a little over the top, and I was a little surprised at that memo.

Pot paging Kettle moment: (Asked about Antonin Scalia as Chief Justice) Because when you — and I have appointed a great many judges as my career as governor — the second thing after a work ethic that you look for when you're appointing a judge or a justice is judicial temperament. That means — in our judicial system, it's very important for the loser and/or the winner in any case to be — to feel like they've been treated fairly and respectfully by the court system. That's what is the glue that binds us together as a society. When you are sarcastic and mean-spirited, as the justice often is from the bench, it leaves the losing — the loser in that case feeling as if they were not respected by the judicial system, and that's why you don't put people with bad temperament on the — on any court, and I certainly don't think they should be on the Supreme Court of the United States.

(Good thing Howard "George Bush is not my neighbor" Dean has never been sarcastic or mean-spirited.)

[Posted 12/12 02:38 PM]