While appearing on CNN's "American Morning," DNC Chairman Howard Dean was asked about his San Antonio radio comments and said his words were taken "a little out of context" and compared it to the way intelligence was "cherry picked" before the war began.
"We can only win the war, which we have to win, if we change our strategy dramatically," Dean said. "The Democrats are coalescing around a different strategy. We hope the President will join us." At another point in the interview, Dean said: "The President has said himself we couldn't win the war," referring to the President's 2004 interview with Matt Lauer in which the President was addressing the war on terror.
Dean described his plan this way: "I'm with Jack Murtha on this. We need a redeployment of our troops, bring the 50,000 Guard troops home in the next six months, they don't belong there. We need a special task force of anti-terror troops staked out in the Middle East. We need 20,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. We need to redeploy our troops and make stop making our troops the target over there. We can turn this over to the Iraqis."
Asked after his interview whether Dean was switching his support from following former Reagan Administration official Lawrence Korb (who envisions US troops getting out of Iraq over two years) to Murtha's approach (who has said that he thinks six months is a reasonable amount of time that it would take for US troops to get out of Iraq), DNC Communications Director Karen Finney said Dean still supports the Korb approach and said that when Dean referenced Murtha, he did so in order to signal that he shares Murtha's goal of getting the target off the backs of American soldiers.
Dean also said in the interview that despite the media's obsessions with intra-party differences, the differences among Democrats are small "perhaps Sen. Lieberman excepted."
If you remember all the pounding Dean took from Lieberman in 2003 and 2004 for allegedly lacking a "certain trumpet," you've got to love the way Dean phrased this: "Not only do most Democratic Senators, most Republican Senators now believe that 2006 has to be a transition year - even Sen. Lieberman voted for that resolution."
The New York Post's Deb Orin says Howard Dean's suggestion that the war in Iraq is unwinnable makes him untouchable for many Democratic candidates around the country. Tennessee Senate hopeful Harold Ford tells Orin, "I probably won't be inviting him to come in and campaign." LINK Bob Kerrey hit Dean hard on "Imus" this morning, in an appearance in which the Greenwich Villager also suggested he didn't know what a "simulcast" is and that he didn't know that Imus' show is a radio program (that happens to be shown on TV).
New York gubernatorial hopeful Eliot Spitzer said yesterday that Dean's comments about winning the war were "flat out dead wrong," reports the New York Post. LINK