Can Dean Last?
By jkelly
We are, I fear, in the last days of Howard Dean’s tenure as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. It was too good to last.
Party chairmen are supposed to raise money and keep their mouths shut. Dean has been failing on both counts.
Through April 30th this year, the Democrats had raised only $20.9 million, compared to $44.7 million for the Republicans.
The numbers for May and June aren’t likely to look better, since three key DNC fund-raisers have announced their resignations.
Dean was on a West Coast fund-raising swing last week. Turnout in Seattle and San Francisco, hotbeds of liberalism both, was less than the DNC expected.
“There is an increasing whiff of desperation permeating the finance side of the DNC, what with Dean apparently feeling like the nerd at a fraternity rush party scooted off to a room to hang with the foreign kid and the nose picker, and the big-time DNC fund-raisers jumping ship like rats sensing something is amiss,” snarked the American Spectator’s Prowler.
But if Dean hasn’t been raising much money at his fund-raisers, he’s been getting media attention:
“Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people,” Dean said in San Francisco. “They’re a pretty monolithic party...and they all look the same...It’s pretty much a white Christian party.”
This characterization came as somewhat of a surprise to Dean’s counterpart at the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, who is Jewish. And boy, doesn’t Condi Rice have a helluva tan?
The week before, in Florida, Dean described Republicans as greedy people who “never made an honest living in their lives.”
Democrats who hold elective office have tried to put distance between themselves and Dean’s comments.
“I don’t think the statement (Dean) made was a helpful statement,” said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.
“The rhetoric is counterproductive,” said Sen. Joe Biden.
“I don’t agree with him,” said John Edwards, former senator and vice presidential candidate.
When Dean visited Arizona recently, that state’s Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, couldn’t find room on her busy schedule to meet with him.
“Dean disappoints Democrats at both ends of spectrum,” wrote the Baltimore Sun’s Jules Witcover, who normally would rather undergo a deep root canal without anesthesia than criticize a Democrat.
“Most Republicans are not coupon clippers,” said former Democratic operative Susan Estrich in her syndicated column. “They go to work and earn a day’s pay like the rest of us. Hearing Howard Dean say otherwise not only offends Republicans, but also moderates and independents who have no taste for the class warfare or the strident liberalism that Howard Dean is selling.”
Democrats who win elections (or at least want to) know that: “vote for us, you racist, homophobe hicks, because we’re so much smarter than you” is not a pitch likely to make a favorable impression on swing voters.
But Dean (oh, please God!) may keep his job because he is expressing what most Democratic activists really think. The typical liberal today is so convinced of his moral superiority that he needn’t obey ethics rules meant for Republicans and other lesser breeds without the Law, and so convinced of his intellectual superiority that he needn’t actually know anything.
An example is the trope, endlessly repeated in the last election, the John Kerry was oh so much smarter than George W. Bush.
“Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a far higher IQ than Bush?” former New York Times editor Howell Raines asked rhetorically in an op-ed in August of last year. “I’m sure the candidates’ SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.”
Actually, Howell, they don’t. Kerry’s grades at Yale were made public last week as a by-product of the modified limited hangout of his Navy records. Kerry’s grades were lousy, slightly lower than those of Bush.
In this instance, as in so many others, liberal assumptions of superiority are not supported by fact. If you spend as much time as liberals do looking down your noses at people who disagree with you, it’s hard to see the road ahead. The only cure for this myopia is a long, long time in the political wilderness. |
