<snip>
"Dean is the only one who had the guts to stand up and oppose the war in Iraq," Seringer said as he stood in the crush of a Dean fund-raiser at a stylish coffeehouse here last week. "The others were sissies; they just fell in line behind the Bush propaganda. And that war was a lie from the beginning."
If Dean wins the Democratic nomination next year, the explanation may be as simple as this: He opposed a president most Democrats detest when that president launched a war most Democrats loathe.
<snip>
What's more, it appears the Democratic activists critical of the war are much more energized than the war's supporters. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the controversies over Bush's use of prewar intelligence, and the postwar casualties and violence are reinforcing a sense among the war's opponents that they were right all along. "Those of us who said the war was a bad idea now have a chance to say it was a bad idea," said James Hargrove, a retired programmer who was at Dean's Austin fund-raiser.
The resurgence of that antiwar sentiment is unsettling the ground for everyone else in the 2004 race.
Most immediately affected are the leading Democrats who supported U.S. action — Sens. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, John Edwards of North Carolina and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. All are facing scorn from an antiwar left that sees their enlistment not only as a policy mistake but a character flaw. Except for Lieberman, who many believe was operating on ideological conviction, the verdict at Dean's Austin fund-raiser was that the Democratic contenders who voted for the war knew it was misguided but supported Bush because they believed it would inoculate them in a general election.
...more
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0901-05.htm
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