just stumbled on this site, looks like some kind of an official dlc site with a bunch of articles from people like sarah bianchi and bill clinton and such. here is what they had to say about dean:
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=252472&kaid=127&subid=171There are many plausible explanations for Howard Dean's downfall, but his perverse decision to run as the anti-Clinton candidate tops my list. While Bill Clinton in 1992 campaigned against his party's past failures, Dean seemed to relish attacking those responsible for its most recent successes.
His campaign not only channeled activists' rage at Bush but also tapped into smoldering resentment in the party's left wing over the New Democrats' intellectual and political ascendancy. The Dean Zeppelin took flight only after Dean, the erstwhile centrist, adopted a belligerent anti-war stance and anointed himself the choleric champion of "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
Why the leftward lurch? Dean and his followers seemed to have swallowed whole the paleoliberals' revisionist history of the 1990s. By this account, Clinton scored strictly personal triumphs by selling out the party's core principles and accommodating the country's rightward drift. Here's Dean's diagnosis: "While Bill Clinton said that the era of big government is over, I think we have to enter a new era for the Democratic Party, not one where we join Republicans and aim simply to limit the damage they inflict on working families." Dean also dismissed the New Democrat electoral strategy of reaching out to independents and swing voters: "We are going to take back the Democratic Party from the idea that the way to win elections is to neglect our base."
That Dean's putsch failed suggests that most Democrats remember the 1990s more fondly than he does. "Limiting damage" hardly does justice to the unprecedented surge of growth and job creation that brought unemployment, poverty, and budget deficits down while driving working family wages up. Public innovation also flourished, as New Democrats introduced national service, public charter schools, more cops and community policing, a work-based social policy to replace welfare, and other reforms. Clinton's "big government" line was not a sop to conservatives but an acknowledgement that central bureaucracies don't work very well in a networked world.
Judged on the results, it's incontestable that the 1990s was America's most progressive decade since the 1960s. Yet many on the left apparently haven't forgiven Clinton for achieving these results in unfamiliar and unorthodox ways.
It's true that Clinton's success didn't enable Democrats regain control of Congress after 1994. But surely that failure should be charged to the account of congressional leaders, who failed to offer the public compelling reasons to return Congress to Democratic control.
Dean's claim that New Democrats ignored the party's base is equally wrong-headed. Clinton's strongest supporters were African Americans, Latinos, and women. Yet Clinton also won more votes than Democratic candidates before and after him from white men, suburban moderates, and independents. He showed, in other words, that the "base versus swing voters" argument poses a classic false choice; winning candidates have to frame appealing messages to both.
Yet Dean embraced that hardy perennial of left-wing fancy: the myth of the hidden majority. It posits that there is a latent leftish majority slumbering in the electorate that can be galvanized to vote -- but only if it hears the message loudly enough. Recent studies of non-voters, however, suggest that their preferences aren't much different from those who do go to the polls.
A more interesting challenge to the New Democrat legacy comes from Stanley B. Greenberg, a prominent Democratic pollster. In his new book, The Two Americas, Greenberg argues that the Clinton Democrats serve a vital purpose by reassuring voters with doubts about Democrats on issues like national security, fiscal discipline, and social and cultural values. But while a strategy of reassurance may eke out a victory in a presidential election, it won't break the deadlock in U.S. politics and build a durable Democratic majority, writes Greenberg.
This may be true. But Greenberg also overlooks the dynamic, reformist dimension of New Democrat ideas. Democrats won't beat Bush or realign U.S. politics by defending the programmatic status quo against GOP onslaughts. To be relevant, they must offer better solutions to today's most urgent challenges: the need to fundamentally redesign our schools for the 21st century; to help poor families achieve self-sufficiency and upward mobility; to promote "clean growth" by helping America kick its oil habit; to help parents balance work and family; to make Medicare an agent of successful aging, not just a payment system; and to modernize Social Security for rising generations that want more personal control over their retirement security.
Dean's campaign failed because the real choice facing Democrats isn't between a principled liberalism and a soulless centrism. It's between ideological purism and a radical pragmatism that wins because it works.
Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.