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.
Other TV ads are saying that Dean ‘will raise taxes on the average family by more than $1,900 a year’. In an attempt to neutralise the attack, the Dean camp is now talking of a rearguard tax-reform plan to include a reduction in payroll taxes. But Bush is one step ahead. He ensured that his $2 trillion package of tax cuts included a ‘sunset clause’, so that some of the reductions will expire halfway through the next term unless they are ‘reactivated’ by the new administration. President Dean would be confronted with the uncomfortable reality that, unless he took action, taxes would automatically rise.
As Dick Morris, Clinton’s former pollster, said at the time, ‘Bush has skilfully — even brilliantly — manoeuvred events to the point where taxes will be front and centre in the 2004 presidential contest.’
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