Wes Clark, standup guy

I was flipping channels this morning and saw Clark on Meet The Press. Along with his usual string of nitpicky irrelevant questions, Tim Russert was baiting Clark into bashing Dean's electoral prospects in the South. Clark said he could carry the south. Could Dean carry the South? Tim asked, echoing the embarrassing (for Koppel, at least) spectacle of the "can Dean win" handcount at the last debate. Like some of the other Dem. candidates, Clark could have bashed Dean, saying "he's too liberal" or some other nonsense, but he did the right thing. He said "that remains to be seen".

Clark has been doing comparatively little direct battle with Dean, and yet he has much better prospects than those professional Dean-ophobes Kerry and Lieberman. Kerry, whose support in NH is apparently imploding, has taken an almost exclusively anti-Dean tack. Attacking his fundraising as somehow not real and, at least on one of the morning shows today, grossly mischaracterizing Dean's tax policies. It's true that Dean wants to undo all of Bush's tax cuts "not just those on the rich." But then Kerry started going on about how Dean was going to reinstate the marriage penalty. Whoa,whoa,whoa. When did Kerry join the Club for Growth? The marriage penalty, like the specter of tort reform, is a Republican rhetorical device. Single people, in many if not most circumstances, pay equal or greater taxes than married people.

I've even seen reasonable people like M. Yglesias wonder what possible reason Dean would roll back all Bush tax cuts. Because it's good sense! Because we're staring at a structural increase in entitlements payoffs in the next few years. Because Dean wants to pay for his health care plan. Because we have huge, huge deficits. It may not be the most popular thing to do, but if it helps put America's fiscal house in order it's the right thing to do.