[Peace-discuss] Dean's demeanor

[C. G. Estabrook]

	The Accidental Populist
	Howard Dean vs. the democratic establishment
	by Steve Perry

On December 7, Howard Dean delivered an amazing and almost universally
ignored speech on race, money, and American politics to a gathering in
Columbia, South Carolina. Dean was on hand for two reasons--to atone for
his suddenly notorious offhand remark that he wanted to be "the candidate
for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," and to seek a
primary-season coup in the backyard of rival John Edwards, whose campaign
sputters more with each passing day. What he offered up was an obvious but
officially verboten blueprint for a different kind of national political
campaign:

"In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful
way--by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial
prejudices, and bringing out the worst in people.

"They called it the 'Southern Strategy,' and the Republicans have been
using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it,
using phrases like 'racial quotas' and 'welfare queens' to convince white
Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America's problems.

"The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said
their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their
campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is
concentrated in the hands of a few. To distract people from their real
agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting
us....

"In America, there is nothing black or white about having to live from one
paycheck to the next. It's time we had a new politics in America--a
politics that refuses to pander to our lowest prejudices. Because when
white people and black people and brown people vote together, that's when
we make true progress in this country."

A year from now, any number of things may have happened. Howard Dean, or
some other Democrat, may have swept W from office owing to circumstances
still unforeseeable from here. More likely, Democrats and the pundit class
will be busy invoking empty, age-old clichés to explain the latest
electoral train wreck. In the not-unlikely event that Dean's campaign is
brought to ruin, part of the key to the tale will lie forgotten in the
Columbia speech, which helps explain why he finds himself in the
unfortunate position of running against both major parties. If you like
what Dean had to say, savor it now, because you aren't likely to hear it
on the stump next fall even if Dean is the nominee.

 

The grand irony in the case of Howard Dean vs. the Democratic Leadership
Council is that it's not at all clear that Dean ever seriously meant to
take on the Democratic party establishment, or that he will even carry
through with the battle. He talked a tough anti-establishment line out of
the gate, yes, but that was the smart outsider play, and Dean's candidacy
had struck party sultans as a bit of trivia from the start. As governor of
Vermont and already as a presidential aspirant, Dean has tended to speak
boldly first and tack practically to the right when under fire. It isn't
hard to imagine his fashioning a rapprochement with the party elite as his
campaign flourished.

If he had been allowed to, that is. But the party blew it. The DNC's
controlling junta--the Clinton/McAuliffe New (business)
Democrats--consistently underestimated Dean's appeal and treated him with
such raw contempt as to make an alliance impossible in the near term. They
tried very hard to derail him instead, which is why so many party regulars
have labored to breathe life into the listless, late-entry bid by Wesley
Clark. (Gore Vidal on Clark: "I don't like these men of great
accomplishment who've accomplished nothing, and who mean nothing.") And
for what it's worth, the DLC's principal attack hound, Tailgunner Joe
Lieberman, has shown no signs of relenting in his verbal assaults. In one
of those bits of doublespeak for which Democrats are rightly as cherished
as Republicans, Lieberman decreed that Dean's opposition to the war and to
Democratic complicity in it proved him a "divisive" force in politics.

Dean, meanwhile, has conducted a back-channel outreach to many prominent
Democrats, resulting most famously in his December 9 endorsement by Al
Gore. The question of the hour is whether Dean is trying to wrestle the
party into embracing him or to take it over. He is on record loudly
intimating the latter, but--well, this is American politics, and people
say a lot of things. More tellingly, perhaps, there are many in and around
the national Democratic fold who really do believe that Gore and Dean have
it in mind to take the party away from the DLC once and for all. It's far
too early to tell whether this is true in any meaningful sense (it's one
thing to really mean it in December, another to stake your future on it in
July), but a couple of observations may be safely made from here.

First, a serious run at taking over the party machine would oblige Dean to
keep running against his own party not just through primary season but the
general election as well. In that sense it would be very much like
McGovern and '72 all over again--remember "Democrats for Nixon" and the
more sub rosa means the Democrats used to undermine McGovern? To have any
hope at all of winning such a race, Dean would have to take his Columbia
speech on economic justice for all and make it the holy writ of his
campaign. He would have to break the first covenant of our dysfunctional
political family, which is never to involve outsiders in family business.
The dirty little secret of the me-too Democrats is that they are really no
more keen on appealing to "nontraditional voters" (traditional nonvoters,
that is) than Republicans. And according to the Washington Post,
Republican functionaries are beginning to grow scared of Dean's capacity
to do just that.

Second, you can probably forget nearly everything in the foregoing
paragraph, because the chances that Dean will pick such an audacious
course and stick to it are surpassingly slim. The presumptive philosopher
king of Dean's epic confrontation with the DLC, after all, is Albert Gore
Jr. It's not hard to believe that Gore would like to seize the party
apparatus from Clinton & Friends, but why should anyone get excited about
the prospect of what he might do with it?

A few eternally masochistic Democrats are trying to make out that they
finally have the new Al Gore they were promised for so long. One of the
smartest consultants I know recently told me that Gore finally seems to
have come into his own. "He seems to be at his best when he's had a chance
to go away and just think," the politico said hopefully. "Like when he
wrote his book." But the mirage of a bearded, far-seeing Gore foraging for
nuts and berries with Tipper at his side faded after a mere few seconds.
"Of course," my acquaintance said, "he had a populist revelation in the
2000 campaign, too, which is when his numbers finally jumped a little bit.
It lasted about a week."

Optimists will correctly point out that Dean has yet to prove himself as
craven as Gore. I'll go further than that: If Dean actually ran a campaign
predicated on the values of his December 7 speech in South Carolina, he
would have a plausible chance to win. As of this moment, he still could be
either the next FDR or the latest Al Gore. But the whole corpus of
conventional wisdom in American politics will continue pressing him back
toward the fabled "center" and the Democratic fold. And if he goes there,
the race will be entirely Bush's to win or lose.

	
Steve Perry · Artist of the Year · Vol 24 · Issue 1204 · PUBLISHED
12/31/03
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/24/1204/article11790.asp
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