This was emailed to me by a friend who picked this up off a weblog:
[I do not agree with everything but a lot of the points the poster makes are worth considering]
Guest Post: The Dean Bubble
December 23, 2003
I’ve been watching the presidential race now for several months and I am finding something rather disturbing. Why is there so much emphasis on Howard Dean? I find the Howard Dean craze to be somewhat of a phenomenon and I just can’t figure it out. Howard Dean seems to have collected some very solid support, but who is he as a candidate?
Obviously this election cycle is a very important one for the Democrats. They are in a must win situation in order to try to get George W Bush out of office. Here comes Howard Dean and capitalizes on his anti-war, anti-Bush stances. He gathered huge numbers of supporters. Liberals came from everywhere to support this champion of anti-Bushism, the Washington outsider, the dark horse candidate from the small state of Vermont. A dream candidate? That’s what his campaign would like you to believe.
In a recent debate, John Kerry was asked the question, “what has Howard Dean done right?” The simple answer to that of course is that he hired the right campaign manager. Joe Trippi has run the Dean campaign with Karl Rove like efficiency and has run a very effective campaign, for the wrong candidate.
Trippi was able to capitalize on the use of the internet to drum up support from anti-Bushers. He determined early that the internet was an underutilized resource in the world of political campaigning and has done a great job of integrating it into this election cycle through the use of meetups, blogging, and online donations. The Dean campaign went beyond that though and were able to pull from that early online support to create something offline. That is where the Dean machine really kicks in.
Tip O’Niel’s old adage was that all politics is local. Trippi understands this. So what did the Dean campaign do? It held house parties. Social events where friends and neighbors got together to talk about this that and the other thing, and oh yeah… George W Bush has to go, have you heard of this guy Howard Dean who is running for President. It feeds from there. House parties spawn more house parties and more house parties and eventually you have a very large movement on your hands with thousands of supporters. Why? Because people aren’t going out to talk about politics, they are going out to socialize and Dean just happens to be a reoccurring topic of conversation.
He has very successfully gathered grass roots support. It is the so called “New Politics”. That alone is very exciting to people and many people jump onboard the bandwagon just for that. It is very empowering to people to know that they can get involved and they can make a difference. In Dean’s speeches he often states that his success thus far is because of the people, telling them that they did this, they can take our country back, they have the power to bring change. They do, and it’s good to see a candidate say these things, but Howard Dean is exploiting that. He is exploiting the inherent desire in each of us to bring about change in this world. He is exploiting it because his grassroots effort, through their own house parties and blogs, have created a candidate in their imaginations that Howard Dean is not and Howard Dean is too afraid to tell them that.
Howard Dean’s supporters tend to be of the liberal variety. Dean himself even makes reference to the late Paul Wellstone when he talks about “the democratic wing of the democratic party” but Dean’s references to Wellstone should be considered offensive to many of the late senator’s followers.
What would Wellstone say to the support of NAFTA?
What would Wellstone say to an A rating from the National Rifle Association? Dean has been endorsed by the NRA 8 times in statewide elections. In his 12 year run as Governor of Vermont he was given the NRA’s top rating as he opposed several common sense gun control measures such as a waiting period for buying handguns.
What would Wellstone say to Dean’s opposition to Medicare? In 1993 Howard Dean called Medicare one of the worst federal programs ever. In a March 5th 1995 interview in the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, LA, Dean went as far as to say, “The way to balance the budget, Dean said, is for Congress to cut Social Security, move the retirement age to 70, cut defense, Medicare and veterans pensions, while the states cut almost everything else. ‘It would be tough but we could do it,’”
Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party? I think not! His supporters maybe, but him? No way. It is a gross distortion of image that has misled many people to support Dean.
Well in the least, Dean is obviously a courageous man. After all he is courageous enough to stand up to George W Bush. Don’t we all hate it when we hear a story in the news about some low life jerk who fakes an injury at work and gets a family doctor to provide sketchy medical information. Then while he is collecting Worker’s Compensation for said injury, he is seen playing hockey and tackle football with his friends. Don’t you hate that guy? How is this relevant? Well, during the Vietnam War, Howard Dean received a medical deferment from the draft for back problems thanks to x-rays provided by his family doctor. He then proceeded to Aspen Colorado where he spent the winter skiing the moguls. If you don’t know what the moguls are, they are also referred to as the bumps and are extremely jarring to the back. Dean’s reply to this is of course that his ailment only affects him during certain physical activity. But not constant jarring from the most back breaking winter event out there? Basically, Howard Dean’s privileged background and money helped him have a winter of fun adventures while some other American kid, who was not as fortunate, was sent off to the killing fields to fight in a war that he didn’t want to be in either. Is that a courageous Howard Dean?
So what else about Dean’s record? Well while Howard Dean has been attacking George W Bush about his secretive government and touting his own vision of open-source-politics, it turns out that Howard Dean’s records from when he was Governor of Vermont have been sealed for 10 years. What was his response to this? In an interview with Vermont public Radio he said, “Well, there are political considerations. We didn’t want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a crucial time in any future endeavor.” Something embarrassing like trying to hide the truth? Like having a secretive government in order to help your own political agenda? While Howard Dean has been spoon feeding his supporters lines about open-source-politics and being open and truthful, he has been anything but.
It is only fitting that Dean received an endorsement from Al Gore. During the 2000 election Karl Rove was successful in portraying Gore as a candidate who would say anything to get elected. I find it interesting that now the man he endorses is exactly that. Someone who will say anything to get elected.
So why is all of this attention surrounding Dean? Because he is leading in New Hampshire? He is from a neighboring state, of course he should do well. Because he is a Democrat who balanced the budget of Vermont? He is constitutionally obligated to under Vermont law [ed. this is not true - the Vermont consititution does not mandate balanced budgets]. Because of the money he has been able to raise? There are several stories of many Republicans who have given money to his campaign in hope that he will become the nominee because they know that he won’t stand a prayer against Bush. Because of the great grassroots support that he has raised? If you are going to base it on that then cast a vote for Joe Trippi. You aren’t voting for a campaign, you are voting for a candidate. I would hope that we should all be intelligent enough to vote for the candidate who has the best leadership qualities, diplomacy skills, foreign policy experience, and domestic ideas that fit in most with our own beliefs about the environment, civil liberties and the economy without being duped into the hype of the size of a campaign.
Dean supporters have been misinformed about their candidate and the media has eaten it up. Dean is an empty shell of a candidate who relies on his anti-Bush stance for support but with no real vision of how to deal with our country once Bush is out. He wants regime change without any clear set of goals as to what to do once the current leader is out. Where have we heard this before?
The Dean supporters are of great value to the Democratic party and to the nation. Their style of involvement and engagement is a model to which I hope future political campaigns are based. It is the power of the grassroots efforts of not just Dean’s campaign but of other candidates as well that I hope will be the lasting impression of the 2004 election. Not the landslide defeat of a shell of a Democratic candidate with no foreign policy experience to the hands of George W Bush as he continues to claim victories in his fight against international terrorism.
Posted by mstoller at December 23, 2003 10:01 PM | TrackBack |
