Come Back To the Five & Dime, Howie Dean

[Kevin Spidel]

Come Back To the Five & Dime, Howie Dean
By Michael Blanding, AlterNet
Posted on June 27, 2005, Printed on June 27, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22304/

Since he became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean has made a big deal about returning the party to the grassroots. For the past few weeks, he has been barnstorming the country holding fundraisers that seem only one step removed from the populist rallies of his presidential campaign. At an event this week in Boston, for example, guests paid just $50 each to attend. Jeans and T-shirts far outnumbered suits, and hot dogs and popcorn replaced the customary canapes.

Jumping up to the podium, Dean looked tanned and relaxed, instantly swinging into a modified stump speech from his campaign. Many of his favorite lines from the presidential race were still in circulation, touching on issues like Social Security ("Enron and the boys") and universal healthcare ("even the Costa Ricans"), and adding some new lines to suit the times, like: "The Republicans' view of small government is just big enough to fit inside Terri Schiavo's hospital bed."

The one issue Dean barely mentioned, however, is the one that helped lift his presidential campaign out of obscurity: The war in Iraq.

Dean's early tirades against the war galvanized the grassroots of the party in 2003, to the extent that thousands of people who had long been disillusioned with the political process were willing to attend house party fundraisers in his honor. Now that public opinion has swung in favor of setting a timetable for bringing American troops home (in a recent Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent were in favor of bringing home "some or all" of the troops), Dean has been silent, or worse, supportive of the President's increasing quagmire. His stance seems to betray the grassroots activists who propelled him into the role of DNC chair in the first place.

more here: http://www.alternet.org/story/22304/

Discuss...

[IndyOp]

1. Good job!

Proud to be a PDA supporter!

:kick:

[Larkspur]

2. Dean can't set Dem policy on Iraq. That's not the job of the DNC Chair

His silence on that issue is indicative that the Dem leadership on the Hill doesn't have a unified plan for Iraq, so to protect Dem chances in 2006, Dean can't expose the Dem divisions on this issue.

And during the primary campaign, Dean did say that we should not abandon Iraq, like Bush I did Afghanistan, so Dean is not supporting Bush II's war, but is worried that Iraq could become a haven for terrorists, a la Taliban Afghanistan.

Some of our Middle Eastern allies, like Egypt, also don't want us to pullout and leave Iraq in chaos, which could spread across the region.

I think that if Dean was President or even Kerry, that he would accept the offer of Muslim and Arab troops and aide from our allies. It's better than leaving Iraq for Iran to support.

It's easy to call for US pullout, but we must really analyze the problem. The real problem fueling the insurgency is the Neo-con policy of brutal occupation and economic exploitation along with age-old native ethnic hatreds inside Iraq.