More About Howard by Matt Singer

[Cheswick2.0]

More About Howard by Matt Singer

http://leftinthewest.com/index.php?p=156

SNIP..."Let’s all repeat it together: this isn’t about liberal-vs-centrist. This isn’t about whether we need to look more appealing to “mainstream” America. Politics is about standing for something.

Politics is about winning and winning involves presenting a compelling message. And something that the DNC (and by DNC, I mean every person stuck in the Beltway mindset) needs to get through its head is that Dean was never running as a left-winger. He was never even running as a hardcore liberal. He was running as a centrist outraged over what was being done to his country."

SNIP..."And the Democratic Party gets ready to act out its own death on stage again. We are a party of hypochondriacs. Every time we lose, we’re convinced we’re deathly ill. In Montana, in 2000, Democrats lost three big statewide offices. They lost the Governor’s race, the US House race, and a US Senate race. They thought the world had ended. But they’d held the Attorney General’s office, the State Auditor’s office, and the OPI office. They made gains in the legislature. The world wasn’t ending. We’d just had a rough year. But people thought things were falling apart. Guess what – we didn’t change party leadership. We just bucked up and kept working. And in 2002, we won a US Senate race, more seats in the legislature, and control of the Public Service Commission.

Then this year, we took back the damn Governor’s office. And we didn’t do it with a namby-pamby-roll-over-and-keep-your-mouth-shut style. We did it by running a candidate with clear contrasts with the Republicans and by pointing out how we would make the state a better place....."