If you are lucky enough to be in Iowa next week, don’t miss a new TV ad campaign against the Democrat presidential candidate front-runner, Howard Dean, ahead of election primaries in the state. The ads, run by a right-wing pressure group, suggest that ‘Dr Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.’
Crude negative election campaigning of this kind makes Tory tax bombshells here in Britain seem pretty tame. The ads are not part of Bush’s $120 million campaign, which has not even begun. But there is little doubt that tax would be at the centre of a Bush–Dean confrontation, which is one of the reasons why Bush strategists are looking forward to taking Dean on. As part of his campaign to secure the Democrat core vote, the Vermont governor has promised to ‘repeal every last dime of the Bush tax cuts’, and so has already walked straight into the President’s trap.
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