“Iraq was a hotbed of terrorism,” Matthew Dowd said on Hardball in 2004. Saddam Hussein “harbored terrorists. And in a post-9/11 environment, we can’t wait for the bad guys to show back up here in America and deal with it. … And the president said the fact of what we did in Iraq in bringing Iraq, a sovereign country, and removing a brutal dictator from power is a good thing for the world and a good thing for the country.”
Dowd was President George W. Bush’s chief adviser in his 2004 reelection. The central issue in Bush’s 2004 reelection was Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks, which, most centrally, was the Iraq War.
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This week, we got the news that Dowd is now running for Texas lieutenant governor as a Democrat. This shouldn’t be shocking, considering that before 2000, Dowd was a Democrat, and after 2004, Dowd was immediately a Democrat. So, Dowd basically took a leave of absence from the Democratic Party to support Bush and most importantly to win the referendum on the Iraq War.
The Iraq War was a lethal mistake. It derailed American efforts in Afghanistan, derailed Bush’s presidency, empowered the Democratic Party, empowered the Islamic State, and eventually, I believe, led to the presidency of Donald Trump.
Of course, there’s nothing contradictory about being a Democrat and justifying a war. Joe Biden supported the Iraq War, the bombing of Serbia, and the regime change in Libya. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq War. Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken supported the Iraq War.
And regardless of the “former Republican” news stories today, Dowd is thoroughly a Democrat.
In 1986, Dowd was the political director of the Texas Democratic Party. In 1988, he was the party’s director of operations, and in 1992, Dowd was a Democratic consultant. That means that he twice campaigned against George H. W. Bush. Dowd advised Democrat Ann Richards against George W. Bush in the 1994 governor’s race. Richards lost, and Republicans took over the state. Then, in 1998, with Republicans ascendant in Texas, fellow Democratic consultant Mark McKinnon hired Dowd to work on W’s presidential campaign. The hiring of McKinnon and Dowd was supposed to be evidence that W had cross-party appeal.
By 2004, Dowd was W’s chief strategist. Then, in 2006, Democrats took over Congress, and W’s popularity plummeted. With Democrats now ascendant, Dowd became a Democrat again, saying that Bush had let him down — specifically citing the Iraq War.
Given that Dowd ran the Yes campaign on the closest thing we ever had to a referendum on Iraq, the 2004 presidential election, it’s hard to swallow that he really had issues with it. And given that he was a Democrat his whole life except for when W was running, it’s hard to see Dowd’s Democratic candidacy as anything special.
