Our Most 'Corporate' President?
His drubbing in Iowa won't change one thing: Howard Dean set the tone of the Democratic campaign on an issue even beyond Iraq, and that's insisting George Bush is uniquely "beholden to corporate interests." Here is Mr. Dean blaming the president for the landmark business scandals of our time: "Our business culture is a disaster in this country. And this president's largely responsible for it . . . He just winks and nods."</br></br>Every candidate has now adopted this line. John Edwards paved his way to New Hampshire this week with a TV commercial accusing Mr. Bush of letting Enron felons escape punishment: "I mean really, if somebody goes down to the grocery store and steals a half-gallon of milk, they end up in jail. But here we go with George Bush's friends. Get in trouble, they don't go to jail."</br></br>Never mind that Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and the like actually took place on Bill Clinton's watch. Never mind that the clean-up has been unprecedently speedy under the Bush Justice Department, with two dozen Enron culprits already in jail or indicted. Never mind that the previous record accounting fraud, Cendant, blew up halfway through Mr. Clinton's second term and we're still waiting for the principals to face trial later this year.</br></br>It turns out the lessons of Enron are as applicable to politics as they are to business: You can fool all the people some of the time.</br></br>Mr. Dean set the tone with a game plan worthy of any Wall Street pump and dump artist. "What you do is crank the heck out of your base," he said, "get them really excited and crank up the base turnout and you'll win the middle-of-the-roaders." He also happens to be a fan of George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics who argues that, in appealing to voters' need for a mommy and daddy, the right symbolic language is more important than making sense.