If I hear one more “Democratic” pundit claim that Dean can’t win….
First, how good are they at predicting politics? Would they have predicted
- that Bush with his history of drinks, drugs, and AWOL would end up President?
- that the Religious Right would trash McCain and go for Bush?
- that millionaire Yalie Bush would successfully paint Gore as a dishonest elitist?
Second, is Dean the “lefty” that they claim? Dean, who balanced the Vermont budget and gets top ratings from the NRA? Dean is a guy with beliefs he actually believes in, and principles he has spent years trying to live by. He’s not a toe-the-line lefty, or righty, or centrist.
And that’s the real problem for the self-styled “Democratic Leadership Council.”
Dean is not a paranoid Bush-lite Democrat. He’s not a DLC sock puppet afraid to blow his nose without a focus group telling him how loud to honk.
I have baaaaaad news for the DLC:
- It costs big money to get sock puppets elected.
- The Republicans are the party with the big money.
- Democrats win by running a candidate people want to vote for, who runs on a clear honest platform of social justice.
That’s how Carter won, it’s how Clinton won, and it’s how Dean is going to win.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Gary Farber // May 23, 2003 at 6:16 pm
I think pretty well of Howard Dean (although I’d like to hear him [and all the other possible Democratic candidates] talk a great deal more, in considerable specificity, about foreign policy), and it’s entirely possible I might end up voting for him a primary, and volunteering for him in the general campaign (we’ll see).
But I can’t help but note in passing that there is no present candidate who is a tenth as much in alignment with the DLC as Bill Clinton was. So it seems a bit contradictory to slam people for alignment with the DNC while praising the candidate who, historically, has been the single closest affiliated and in agreement with the DLC.
I’m just saying. :-) Keep up the good work!
2 Betsy Devine // May 23, 2003 at 8:03 pm
Gary–it would be an honor to have you on our team!
In fact, I’m now regretting that I got so cross with the DLC. They do at least care about working- and middle-class people, although their methods are different from mine. I’m also mollified by the way other people lined up to spank them for bashing Dean–TNR called the article “shrill” and said it “took many cheap shots.”
In retrospect, the DLC “Dean can’t win” meme was not as scary as it seemed at first. All it meant was “we don’t want Dean to win the primary, so we’re going to say the worst thing we can think of about him.” If Dean wins, I hope they’ll be working with us to elect him. If somebody they like wins, I still think that person would be better than Bush, so I’ll work to elect him.