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Sunday's New York Times Magazine:
"Dean perfectly embodies the modern Democratic Party, whose ideology feels so muddled and incohesive that labels of 'left' and 'center,' at least in terms of governing philosophy, are almost irrelevant. So-called centrists, with precious few exceptions, have lined up with their party's base against the idea of partly privatizing Social Security, even though those same Democrats used to argue that the program was gravely ill; so-called leftists, meanwhile, have embraced the gospel of budget restraint. The only real arguments among Democrats now are entirely tactical in nature. Should Democrats make an impassioned, populist argument against Bush's war and his tax cuts? Or should they try to sound more reasoned and Clintonian, arguing that some wars are good (but not this one) and that some tax cuts are fine (but not these)? Should they talk more about God, or increase their turnout among black voters? What was once the purview of pollsters and admen has become the central dialogue of the Democratic Party itself."
"Democrats mistake this vacuum of substantive conflict for a kind of hard-won unity on the issues. But intellectual obliqueness and facility are cheap fabrics from which to stitch together unity, and they unravel too easily. Real debates between competing visions of the future — debates of the kind that pitted Hubert Humphrey against Strom Thurmond on civil rights, or Robert Kennedy against Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam — are what sharpen arguments and energize parties, even when they lead to defeat."
And Dean, says Bai, can be the catalyst.
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