Howard Dean: The Bet's Off on Incumbency

This exchange between Rove and Dean shows the extent that Democrats rue the 2010 elections. Maybe they know more than we do.

Excerpt: Now, back to Mr. Rove and Governor Dean.

Rove is no Pollyanna on matters electoral. He studiously refuses yet to predict a GOP majority in either house in 2011. The highest he is willing to go in the Senate at this point in time is 49 Republican seats, with, perhaps, a majority if the party wins two out of four seats in Washington (Murray), California (Boxer), Wisconsin (Feingold), and New York (Gillibrand). He predicts, again at this point in time, only a thirty-five-seat pick-up in the House, a figure insufficient to separate septuagenarian Nancy Pelosi from her speaker's gavel.

Yet onstage at Albany, listening to Howard Dean's incumbency shtick, Rove finally had enough.

Before an audience of 2,500, he called Dean out on his assertion regarding congressional incumbency, daring him to put his money where his mouth is and challenging him to a $1,000 bet (with the proceeds to go to a University at Albany scholarship fund) that there would be three times as many Democratic incumbents defeated as current GOP officeholders.

Dean looked ill. His smile broadened artificially. His brow furrowed genuinely.

He wouldn't bite.

A frustrated but still confident Rove raised the ante.

Make it four -- four times as many, he challenged.

Still no response beyond Dean's pasted-on grin and a waggle of his eyebrows meant to convey something or other.

"I know you're a cheapskate, Howard," Rove goaded the former Vermont governor.

"Democrats are always much more careful about their money," Dean responded, merely providing Rove an opportunity to skewer him and his co-religionists.

"It's other people's money they're free with," said Rove.

Dean kept his silence because there is other people's money, and there is your money -- and then there are other people's incumbents, and your incumbents.

Read American Thinker article here.