Category: Howard Dean

Look Ma, No Toilet.

Last Friday, the Pentagon admitted that a Quran — and detainee — were in fact urinated on by a guard at Guantanamo. But, according to the eagerly dismissive White House, there’s no need to court-martial anybody or anything. (Heck, you should hear about Dubya’s crazy pledge days.) In the meantime, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) took time off from castigating Howard Dean to call for the closing of Guantanamo.

Dean-N-C.

With the exit (Stage Right) of Martin Frost and multiple endorsements (including that of Clinton consigliere Harold Ickes), it now seems to most observers that Howard Dean has the DNC chair in the bag. (For their part, the GOP were already relentlessly on message: Said Rich Bond, “I think it’s a scream.“) While I’ll admit that I can’t speak knowledgably about all of the candidates’ positions, to my mind Dean seems like a great choice for the post, one that will stir enthusiasm among the grass roots and move the party where it needs to go: towards an independent and progressive message that doesn’t reek of Republican-lite, and a take-no-prisoners feistiness in every political race across the country. So, congrats to the Governor and his supporters — now, the real work begins…

The Roots Come Alive.

After the general post-election gloominess began to wear off near the end of last year (of course, it hasn’t completely subsided — at times, I think you can still see the cynicism emanating off me like little cartoon lines), I made it a resolution of sorts to start getting more involved in Dem organizing for this upcoming political cycle. So when some friends of mine (and founders of Concerts for Change) alerted me to their forum this evening on “Net Roots and the DNC,” which included A-list lefty bloggers Atrios and Afro-Netizen, former Dean director Zephyr Teachout, Personal Democracy Forum editor Micah Sifry, and NY Dem Party higher-ups Judith Hope and Mark Green, I very quickly decided to go check it out.

All in all, it made for a partial yet intriguing glimpse into the State of the Party 2005, and one I found at turns dispiriting and encouraging (and far more often the latter.) The panel itself was decently engaging, with most of the discussion centered around the imminent battle for DNC chair. (While there were a number of Simon Rosenberg buttons among the attendees, the panel seemed to split between Dean enthusiasts and DNC agnostics, who felt the upcoming election wasn’t of much import regardless of who wins.) There was also some discussion of the role left-leaning bloggers might play in helping to keep the media more attuned to right-wing spin jobs, but, alas, no one figured out how to square that circle just yet.

Former mayoral candidate and Nader Raider Mark Green, charismatic enough in that politico way, closed out the forum part of the evening with some clever but clearly canned remarks for the Young People into that Newfangled Technology stuff. (For example, he advised the crowd to “choose your mentors well,” which, c’mon now, is the same hoary advice Strom Thurmond gave 1000 of us at Boys’ State when I was 17 years old.) He also regaled us with a short US history lesson, which I’ll give him a B+ on — he was spot-on with George Washington plying his constituents-to-be with rum and George McGovern and direct mail, less so with the Lincoln the “real Log Cabin Republican” quip.)

As I said, I found some elements of the evening somewhat discouraging (and not just because I soon realized that my limited socializing skills at these sorts of things had further atrophied since entering academia.) For one, at times I felt the discussion seemed on the verge of degenerating into the worst kind of New Left-era identity politics, whereby the gender and ethnicity of the new DNC chair was somehow more important than his or her vision for the party. [This was driven home by a (white) fellow in the back hijacking the conversation at one point (does this sort of thing happen at GOP events? I always wonder) and loudly enumerating the few minorities in the room (By which he meant black people — Latinos and South Asians went under the radar), all to suggest that the event was somehow a charade and a farce for its lack of proportional representation.]

This is not to say that issues of gender and ethnicity aren’t central to our party’s core principles, or that the all-white-male slate for DNC chair isn’t a disappointment — to suggest otherwise would be imbecilic…even, dare I say it, Summers-esque. But, to my mind, it’s a question of focus. White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, straight, gay, or bisexual…we Dems just got our asses handed to us by the predominantly white male GOP. At a certain point — hopefully soon — we’re going to have to learn to deemphasize these differences among us and reemphasize our commonality as left-leaning citizens of the republic, rising up together against the corporate-sponsored avarice, imperial ambitions, and narrow-minded bigotry of today’s Republican Party. In other words and IMHO, rhetorically we need to start thinking 1933, and at times I heard way too much 1972 tonight.

(Also, and I know this is a goofy history-geek semantic distinction that I’ll just have to get over, but people kept throwing around ‘progressive’ when they meant ‘liberal.’ Not the same, y’all.)

All that being said, however, my general impression of the evening was quite favorable, mostly because of the energy, exuberance, and organizational acumen on display from the attendees. We may have lost the recent battle in 2004, but much of the online community-building infrastructure seems intact…and, indeed, seems to be here for the duration. I was reminded of the recent scholarship on the rise of the New Right (by Lisa McGirr, Rick Perlstein, and Matthew Dallek, among others), which ably demonstrates how conservatives, soundly defeated in 1964, managed to capture the California governorship only two years later, once Reagan had replaced Goldwater at the top of the movement. For now, the wheels are definitely churning at the grass-roots level…if we can just get the party machinery in order, find a standard-bearer willing to abandon the protective camouflage, and, most importantly, work on a way to articulate our democratic values against the corporate ministrations of the GOP, we might actually get somewhere.

If nothing else, it speaks volumes that conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie is worried about what he sees from the online left — he’s a guy who knows a thing or two about political organizing, and how quickly the worm can turn. Matt Drudge and GWB, we’re coming for you.

Gunning for the Doctor.

“If you think you have seen this movie before — ‘Dean Against the Machine’, you have…Then, as now, Dean inspired an outside-the-Beltway, Net-based crusade whose shock troops adored his social progressivism and his fearless opposition to war in Iraq. Then, as now, a party establishment — based in Congress, governors’ mansions and Georgetown salons — viewed him as a loudmouthed lefty whose visibility would ruin the Democratic brand in Red States.” Writing in breathless hyperbole mode as usual, Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman surveys the consensus anti-Dean reaction among DNC poobahs (purportedly being led by the 2008-conscious Clintons.)

I remained pretty agnostic about Dean’s candidacy last winter – when he seemed he had the big mo, I was all for the party getting behind him. But, I can’t say I was heartbroken by any means after the Iowa collapse. (In retrospect, of course, it’s hard to think of a single state that Kerry won that Dean also wouldn’t have carried.) That being said, to my mind Dean as DNC chair makes for a much better fit. The job of DNC chair is to fire up the grass roots and get Dems elected, and Dean has already shown a marked ability to achieve the former. Plus, it was the protective-camouflage, middle-of-the-road DNC’ers that foisted Terry McAuliffe on us, and he was an out-and-out embarrassment from start to finish. (Don’t agree? Go look at the November results again.)

As many others have noted, Dean isn’t nearly as lefty as he’s being made out to be — He’s a fiscally conservative governor. As such, the reaction he has fostered among the insider crowd has very little to do with governing ideology and a lot to do with one faction desperate to maintain controlling power over the party. Dean or no, if the DNC chairmanship is filled by another unenterprising flunky along the lines of McAuliffe, we’ve already started down the road to more of the same in 2008, right down to the losing.

A Doctor in the House.

After weeks of speculation, Howard Dean officially throws his hat in for DNC Chair. Given how he energized the party in late 2003, I think he’d be a first-rate choice for the post. And, if nothing else, his candidacy should augur the type of intra-party soulsearching we failed to do after Gore‘s loss in 2000, and provoke fear in the hearts of the GOP-lite DLC types who push us down the road to protective camouflage every election year. But, a word of warning, Dr. Dean…this is one sick patient you’re taking on.

Stuck in the Middle With You.

“If establishment Democrats still fear Howard Dean, they ought to elect him chairman of the Democratic National Committee…” Following in the footsteps of such insightful political blogs as Value Judgment, Slate‘s Chris Suellentrop warns Dean to stay away from the DNC. “Ed Rendell was so frustrated with his job as DNC chairman during Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign that he complained to the New Republic, ‘I basically take orders from 27-year-old guys in Nashville who have virtually no real-life experience. All they’ve done is been political consultants living in an artificial world, and basically their opinion counts more than mine.’” Heh.

Two roads diverged.

While new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid shores up Scalia’s creds for Chief Justice (ugh, the new Congress hasn’t even met yet and he’s already Daschle redux), Howard Dean preps for a big State of the Party speech tomorrow in which he’ll “argue that the Democratic Party should be rebuilt from the grass roots up, that it should be driven by millions of Americans who make small contributions rather than by a handful of moneyed interests, and that the party should focus not just on presidential politics in swing states like Ohio and Florida but also on down-ballot races even in the reddest of states.” If these are my choices, put me on the Dean Machine…the endless protective camouflage song-and-dance perp’ed by Reid this past weekend has to stop. Update: More on Dean’s speech.

First, We take the DNC.

“Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win. You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline.” The DLC and other Democratic centrists push Tom Vilsack, Jeanne Shaheen, and a handful of other milquetoast contenders to be the next DNC head (and to thwart the Dean alternative.) Look, it’s obvious the Republican-lite status quo wasn’t working. It’s time to drop the protective camouflage and articulate a progressive narrative that highlights the grotesquely pro-corporate nature of the GOP. With that in mind, let’s sidestep the party flaks, and go ahead and pick Howard. At this point, it’s not like we have anything to lose.

Aftermath.

“Let’s put our heads together, and start a new country up…” Well, it’s been a week. So now what? Howard Dean says put me in charge (Sure, he can’t be worse than McAuliffe), James Carville says let’s find a new story (and Keep It Simple, Stupid), and John Kerry, well, he’s “fired up” about returning to the Senate (?)…and has started contemplating a 2008 run.