Why I'm for Dean (The Nation)

[mrgorth]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031215&s=greider

snip
First, the rivals saw him as a McGovernite lefty from the 1960s. When that didn't take, they decided to depict him as a right-wing clone of Newt Gingrich who wants to dismantle Medicare and Social Security. Finally, opponents sold political reporters on the story of Mr. Malaprop, an oddball from tiny, liberal Vermont so insensitive to the nuances of American politics his mouth will destroy him. Howard Dean surged ahead through all this. The other candidates and witting collaborators in the press got him wrong every time.

Howard Dean is an odd duck, certainly, in the milieu of the contemporary Democratic Party. He is, I surmise, a tough and savvy politician of the old school--a shrewd, intuitive pol who develops his own sense of where the people are and where events are likely to take public opinion, then has the guts to act on his perceptions. That approach--leading, it's called--seems dangerously unscientific in this era of high-quality polling and focus groups, the data interpreted for politicians by expensive consultants. The press corps has not had much experience with Democrats of this type, so reporters read Dean's style as emotional, possibly a character flaw. He reminds me of olden days when Democrats were a more contentious bunch, always fighting noisily among themselves and often with creative results.

snip

[jpgray]

1. They are right about his style, much more fiery than the Congressionals

And therefore more exciting and inpsirational. His campaign risks have been very good also (except for the flag stumble).

[Cha]

2. Hooray Hooray Hooray! I was just talking to

a friend this morning who was wondering about Dean..and she reads "The Nation" so I will point this in her direction!

[wtmusic]

3. make sure she's at a meetup on Wed.

the size of ours has doubled in the last week--almost no room

[madfloridian]

4. Husband just gave out two Dean buttons in the grocery store.

They walked to the car with him to get flyers. He has given a lot without even mentioning it. If someone asks, he has extras.

[Bombtrack]

5. Dean and his proponents can really exagerate everything from the outset

"First, the rivals saw him as a McGovernite lefty from the 1960s"

well, no, they just saw and still see a candidate who is inherantly much less electable than others for about half a dozen good reasons, none of them having to do with Dean being left-wing, but an understanding of public opinion and how apposed it is to a negative, blue-blood, middle-class-tax raising governor of 600000 with no washington or military experience when such cred is at a premium.

"When that didn't take, they decided to depict him as a right-wing clone of Newt Gingrich"

Actually when Gephardt pointed that Dean's positions on one issue were closer to Gingrich's than his, Dean immediatly accused Gephardt of comparing Dean to gingrich, something he didn't do. This article expands apon that exaggeration

[Nazgul35]

22. and yet he's the front runner...

I have yet to have a supporter of another candidate explain to me how...if Dean wins the nomination and the doom that they are predicting as a result in the general election would have been avoided by their candidate.....and here's is the part they cant' answer so i'll bold it for them.....how the hell is your candidate going to do any better if they can't win their own party's nomination!!!????

When ya'll can put together a coherent answer to this question please wake me up from all these boring ass anti-Dean threads...somehow I think i'm going to have a nice long nap!

And to forstall any nonsense from fantasy land...since we have sooo many professional political operatives on here (after all...if they were really that good they'd be off working on a campaign and not posting on DU...)...provide me with the alternative winners for the following failed dem campaigns as well:

Carter 1980
Mondale 1984
Dukakus 1988
Gore 2000

???? 2004

excuse me while I go work on my candidates campaign.....

[Bombtrack]

23. and you don't understand is that a primary and general aren't parallel

not even close to it. If they were, McCain would have been a much weaker general election candidate than Bush was. And if you believe that Gore would have trounced McCain, you're insane.

Dean is doing well for a few reasons, not one of them being he's even a decent general election candidate. His supporters almost uniformly care more about there anti-war and "bush-is-evil" emotions being reenforced and pacified than thinking about what we're up against and it would actually take to beat. The second component that nobody talks about is the effort of the right to destroy Dean's opponents and promote Dean, through money and through media, at high levels and at low levels, with no conspiracy really being necessary.

as far as past dem campaigns, go, you leave out 72, in which Nixon, Creep, and Segretti successfully destroyed Ed Muskies campaign, a man who could have beat Nixon, and got McGovern nominated

I don't know enough about the 1980 campaign, and you might be right that Reagan could have beaten whoever, but a democrat who didn't propose to raise the middle class taxes might well have beaten him.

Just a quick glamce at the 88 electoral map, percentages of the states, and an understanding of the issues, prove that a different candidate could have beaten Bush in 88. Maybe Gore, maybe one of the midwestern candidates. The popular vote was tight yet the electoral vote was a landslide. Why? well a big part was because Dukakis was a
perceivedly typical-liberal governor from a typical New England state
who had a particularly unpopular social position, all of which allowed his Texan opponent to write off the south as his, and concentrate on the west and midwest.

And in 2000, they had to more or less steal the election. Gore-Lieberman came back from a double-digit trail in the polling to beat Bush, only to have it stolen

[ozone_man]

6. A great article.

Maybe about the best description of Dean that I've read. I think the author also did a good job of describing Dean's moderate position:

"With issues, Dean is pretty much what he says: a middle-of-the-road moderate, neither left nor right, though middle in Vermont is liberal ground. As governor, he was skilled at maneuvering through contending forces, sometimes angering both sides in the process."

[NashVegas]

7. "Dangerously Unscientific"

I like that.

Political science vs the art of the possible ...

[AP]

8. The Nation's shortsightedness during Wilson's presidency:

I read a book recently (The End of the American Era) which explained some of the history of the failure of the League of Nations.

There were a couple reasons it failed. Wilson refused to compromise and he refused to allow Republicans to participate. However, one of the key reasons it failed was because The Nation turned on Wilson. He wasn't passing their liberal litmus test.

It turned out that, probably because of the failure of the League of Nations, millions of people needlessly died in WWII.

[slinkerwink]

9. wtf?

The Nation is a MAGAZINE, not an international organization.

[AP]

13. That's what I'm talking about.

The Nation -- the magazine, which has been around a LONG time.

I'm about 99% sure that Kupchniak (sp?) in his book talks about how The Nations liberal purity test led them to criticize Wilson from the far left, which resulted in the end of the LofN which then led to a ton of misery, because the feeling was that the LoN could have stopped WWII.

[Zomby Woof]

15. what would have stopped WW2

Was making Versailles less harsh and punitive in its demands on Germany. Blame the French for that one.

Lincoln knew that a compassionate tack with the south would aid in reconstruction, and was killed for it anyway, and we finally learned the lesson after WW2, by extending a helping hand to Japan and Germany.

Why all this hand-wringing over the League? They were doomed from the git-go, as hapless and ineffectual. The myth that the United States having membership in it would have saved us from the second is a strange one to still be holding on to 80 years out.

I think the Nation article about Dean is a wash, but over all, I love the magazine, and highly doubt it ever had that much pull, in Wilson's time or our own.

[JohnKleeb]

16. I think Versailes caused WWII honestly

IIRC Wilson didnt want to be hard on the Germans like Clemenceu and Lloyd George did or maybe Lloyd George was in the middle. :shrug: I am not famliar with WWI, I read All Quiet on the Western Front and know a little and thats all.

[AP]

17. Ulitmately, UN did many of the things that LofN tried to do.

The sticking point with Wilson was whether members had an obligation to defend other members. I believe his slight concession on this point was what The Nation criticized him over. FDR learned from that lesson, and was smarter handling that problem.

And look at the world since the UN started -- no more world wars. If it the UN had been in place before WWII it might have stopped WWII.

[JohnKleeb]

18. Well I think the league was a good idea

And youre right FDR got the idea from the UN basically from Wilson. Remember though the GOP like Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover didnt wanna get involved, I think Senator Lodge was the one who led the charge against it. I hear ya though.

[AP]

20. Don't take my word for it. Read "The End of the American Era."

It's not my argument. It's one of the arguments in the book. But it's not much of a stretch. An attack on the left from the far left (or on the right from the far right) is often much more devesating that an attack from the other side of the spectrum.

You know the saying: "sometimes women are their own worst enemies." That's basically the personal version of the political argument Kupchniak makes about The Nation during Wilson's presidency (when it was the voice of progressives).

[Zomby Woof]

14. Wilson shouldn't pas ANY liberal litmus test

I doubt if the United States would have really made all that much of a difference in the League of Nations. As with the UN, we would have wnated it to do our bidding, which is not always a good thing.

Wilson was a white supremacist (read his U.S. History work about his feelings regarding black people and the Confederacy), anti-women's suffrage, ivory tower pinhead. He also lied about "keeping us out of war". He just wanted to get the isolationist vote to secure re-election, and then, get the US into the war in Europe. Which he did in short order not long after his 2nd inauguration. The Lusitania was one of the phoniest pretexts outside of the "Maine" or Gulf of Tonkin to justify US intervention in a war.

His name is a disgrace to the Democratic party. Not even John Kennedy rates as low in my esteem.

[AP]

21. The League of Nations would have been a great step forward for

liberal internationalism, it could have saved millions of lives, and could have pretended fascists from making the progress they made between the wars.

Regardless of what Wilson's other policies were like, the LoN was a very good and very liberal idea which right wingers (some of whom made lots of money off war) sabotaged BECAUSE they knew it was a great liberal idea.

And it took a great liberal, FDR, to finally get it passed in an incredibly deft set of manoeuvers, with which LBJ's passabe of the '64 Civil Rights Act is its only rival in terms of great liberal achievements.

Had Wilson done what FDR did (had he been the political genius FDR or LBJ were) they could have saved the world a great deal of misery.

[mzmolly]

10. I just subscribed to the Nation...

Thanks for the great article.

[JNelson6563]

11. Utterly delightful!

What a great article, thanks for posting.

Here's a favorite blurb:

The ubiquitous "party sources" have explained that Dean merely caught a lucky break by declaring early and forcefully against the war on Iraq at a time when Americans were overwhelmingly prowar. Who knew things might change? The doctor knew.

A more pertinent question is, Why didn't other leading candidates see this tragedy coming? Their reticence was symptomatic of the inert Washington insiders, exceedingly cautious, indifferent to whatever roils the party's rank and file, and always a few steps behind the curve. The explanation that Washington candidates voted for the war on principle or were misled by Bush doesn't help them. Their blindness to the potential consequences (now unfolding) is another reason to be for Dean. He, meanwhile, speaks plainly to the error of US imperialism. "America is not Rome. We do not dream of empire. We dream of liberty for all."

This is a rich article. Great read.

Julie

[mmonk]

12. They are working hard

for the Dean scenario.

[unfrigginreal]

19. LOL

Is Rove in control of Nation magazine now?
:tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat:

[mzmolly]

24. This is one of the main reasons I love Howard Dean...

"I first observed these qualities during Dean's second-to-last term as governor. Vermonters were inflamed--everyone was coming after him--when he and Democratic legislators enacted the infamous Act 60, a school-financing-equalization law that compelled the "gold towns" to share their property-tax revenues with poorer townships..."

And...

"Wow, I thought. This is a different kind of politician--no ducking the blame, no cute obfuscation. The law isn't perfect, Dean added. We will fix it later if we have to. (They did.) Vermont progressives were upset, too, because Dean had refused to consider raising income taxes to finance the schools. His logic, however, was more liberal than it appeared. Raising income taxes would put all the burden on Vermonters, many of whom are poor. Raising property taxes--with a generous homestead exemption for full-time residents--put the big hit on the out-of-state people who own so many lovely vacation homes there. Dean did not explain this to the "flatlanders," but we figured it out."

And in a nutshell:

"Dean continues to up the ante for his rivals--calling for reregulation of key industries and confronting the concentrated power of corporations and wealth. These are solid liberal ideas others are afraid to express so directly. The guy is a better politician than the insiders imagined, indeed better attuned to this season than they are.

INDEED... Great article!