Mort Zuckerman, who publishes the New York Daily News when he's not socializing with Bill and Hillary Clinton, is warning Democrats against choosing Howard Dean as their standard-bearer, calling the Vermont Democrat an "albatross" who is likely to lead his party "over the cliff."
Zuckerman's paper - America's largest-circulation daily tabloid - slammed the Democratic presidential front-runner in its lead editorial on Tuesday, saying several of Dean's recent comments make him seem soft on terrorism.
Said the News:
"It is astonishing that Democrats cannot see the doom that awaits if they nominate a candidate who said this about Osama Bin Laden: 'I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found. I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.'"
"The Democrats would be well-advised to imagine the campaign ads that Bush's mastermind, Karl Rove, would cook up," Zuckerman's paper warned.
"He'd start with Bin Laden, move on to Dean's declaration that the U.S. was not safer with Saddam Hussein in custody and happily focus on Dean's irresponsibility in spreading the conspiracy theory that Bush knew about the 9/11 plot beforehand and did nothing to stop it."
The paper's highly unusual pre-emptive strike is sure to spark speculation about whether the media mogul, who also publishes U.S. News & World Report, is carrying the Clintons' water with the Dean warning.
The News publisher has been tight with the former first couple for the better part of a decade.
Most famously, Zuckermen was aboard Air Force One in 1995 during a trip to Israel for Yitzhak Rabin's funeral. While he played cards with Clinton, surrounded by the luxurious trappings of the presidency, then-newly crowned Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was relegated to the back of the plane.
After Gingrich complained, Zuckerman's paper front-paged a cartoon of the top Republican as a crybaby, complete with diapers and bottle.
The cozy relationship between the publisher and president was sometimes reflected in his own U.S. News column, where he gushed in 1998, just before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, "Most Americans see Clinton as extremely intelligent, formidably well informed, and rhetorically persuasive, and as someone who cares about the average American."
But with his newspaper's Dean-bashing editorial today, the $64,000 question becomes: Is the ex-president now using his media friend to head off a Dean disaster next year while he publicly maintains the facade of neutrality?
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