Gagging Dr. Howard Dean - Democratic Underground

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Gagging Dr. Howard Dean

City Pages
June 22, 2005

Gagging Dr. Dean
by Steve Perry

Next it was the Democrats' turn to declare open season on Dean. The catalyst was a series of "provocative statements" concerning Tom DeLay, the idle rich, and the Republicans' status as a white Christian enclave. As to the particulars of his remarks, more shortly. But first a brief roll call of some of the prominent Democrats who have damned the party chair with criticism or surpassingly faint praise lately. When Dean proclaimed that a lot of Republicans did not work for a living, it was too much for John Edwards: "The chairman of the DNC is not the spokesman for the party.... He's one voice. I don't agree with it." Also for Joe Biden, who seemed to speak from the same script: "He doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric, and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats." Harold Ford, Jr. of Tennessee, a Congressional up-and-comer whose fate it will someday be to lose to Barack Obama in the Democrats' version of American Idol, said: "It may get to the point where the party may need to look elsewhere for leadership, because he does not speak for me." A guest at a party planning confab in the home of Clinton pollster Mark Penn later told Fineman, "There was a ton of positive energy at the house, except for the fear and loathing of Dean." Also piling on: Mark Warner, Ben Nelson, Dianne Feinstein, Barney Frank, Harold Ickes, and the press aide to Sen. Hillary Clinton. It's a pretty impressive field, encompassing most of the presumed or dark horse Democratic presidential candidates for 2008.

On June 2, Dean threw a bit of red meat to a gathering of party activists. Concluding a comment about a shortage of voting stations in Ohio last November, he jibed that Republicans might not understand the hardship of missing work to stand in long voting lines because "a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives." Miraculously, the building in which Dean spoke these words did not collapse around him, but beneath it the foundation of the Republic trembled and threatened to break apart. Republicans the party of privilege? Who but a hateful troll like Dean could even conceive such a mad thought?

The media deserve a lot of credit for making a scandal of it, readily eliding Dean's comment about GOP elites into a remark about "many Republicans" (Boston Globe) or finally "Republicans" in general (San Francisco Chronicle). Of the various remarks for which Dean has been pilloried lately, Democrats were most vociferous in distancing themselves from this one. The reason was simple: The sort of folk Dean held up to contempt are the main funders of the Democratic Party, too. Thanks to New York Times tax reporter David Cay Johnston's book Perfectly Legal, we know a little more about the composition of what he terms the "political donor class." We know first of all that it's very small and very rich: By Johnston's calculation, about one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans give 80 percent of the total moneys received by the two major political parties. Many of the big donors, especially the corporate bundlers, make a point of playing both sides; many give to one party or the other. But it all works out in the end, since they have far more in common with each other than with the other 99-plus percent of the country. Most of what you need to know about the futility and corruption of the Democratic Party--the me-tooism, the abject fear of fighting spirit or fighting words, the overarching role of money in all of the above--is summed up in this little episode.

Ideologically, Dean makes a curious vessel for the party establishment's wrath. As he told a very liberal-friendly ACLU crowd in Minneapolis two months ago, he is "not that liberal" himself. In fiscal terms he is a balance-the-budget guy, like Bill Clinton, who in turn described himself thusly, in Bob Woodward's The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House: "I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans. We're Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market." Dean talks about social programs, mainly health care, but of course a Democratic Party that followed his lead would be mightily constrained in funding social programs by its budget-balancing creed. In sum, Dean is a little more liberal on domestic issues than Clinton, a little less liberal than Richard Nixon. Now that he has quit speaking up against the war (We cannot leave Iraq, he says at every stop), there is little to make him unpalatable to frontline Democrats on issues of policy.

http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1281/article13433.asp