What's Wrong With Howard Dean
Lack of timeliness can be the death of a blog. But whatever. If you’re still reading, you’re a die-hard, so you’ll put up with it, I hope. ;-)
Howard Dean’s references a couple weeks back to the Republican Party as a “white Christian party” caused reactions ranging from outrage on the right to mild embarrassment at center-left to cheerleading on the far left. I’m a bit irritated with it, not least because if you swap in any other ethnicity or religion into his comments, he’d be hounded out of political life.
It’s really symptomatic of a bigger problem, though, and one I expected when Dean was chosen to head the Democratic National Committee. His reputation as a loose cannon and presidential backing by far-left groups like MoveOn.org pointed to an event like this, and to some extent the reaction.
The mistake the Dems made in selecting Dean was that it encouraged a political culture in which the other side isn’t just wrong, but genuinely evil. The party leader going off like that makes the true believers feel really good and self-satisfied in their convictions, just like an Ann Coulter speech might for arch-conservatives — except Ann Coulter doesn’t hold a leadership position in the Republican Party. Meanwhile, what the swing-voting 20% of the populace hears from Dean is that not a single time when they swung right did they make an informed decision based on policy differences; nope, according to the head of the Democratic Party, they were SUPPORTING THE SIDE OF EVIL. It’s a hellfire-and-damnation Baptist sermon come to politics — it fires up the already-converted, but does nothing or worse for intelligent people who take the other side at times. Ann Coulter can behave like that because she has no power and no responsibility. Conversely, as DNC chair Dean’s mission should be to appeal to those people effectively, not push them away.
The odd thing is that Howard Dean wasn’t like that as Governor of Vermont; he resembled a Mark Warner-type left-centrist, slightly less pro-business than (Virginia Gov.) Warner but more protective of Second Amendment rights. (IIRC, the NRA never had a problem with him at state level.) Now, Warner is starting a national PAC to confront Dean’s hard-left base and make sure the Democrats don’t degenerate into an ideologue-laden permanent minority party. As an American first and conservative second, I hope Warner’s successful, even knowing that he’ll have to slide some ways left to gain national Democratic traction. I’d rather have a sane, effective opposition party, even if they do win sometimes — it’s better for the country that way.
27 June 2005 / 1 Comment / Tags: politics