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Governer Dean Becomes Chair of DNC
sg3000 writes "It's official: the Democrats elected Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Dean won the position after a particularly contentious run for chairman, as reported in The New Republic. Governor Dean became a national figure during his impressive run for president in 2003, where he started as an outsider and long-shot candidate but became the front runner, only to see support fail to materialize during the Iowa caucuses."
My prediction is the Dean will surprise all his critics over the next 4 years as a calm, rational, focused, and successful leader. Why? Because he is a calm, rational, focused, and successful person.
The reason why Dean exploded the way he did is because the media turned against him because he was "unelectable". It was a bunch of bullshit because he was not your typical "say only what you want to hear" politician. I think people in this country would have been smart enough to see that, and it would not have been a landslide win for Bush like the media said it would be. Unfortuntly the media has a lot of effect on the primary elections.
I gave $100 to the Dean campaign, and I do not regret it. That money indirectly helped him become the chair of the DNC, and I am very happy to see it.
BTW, at the Iowa Caucus (I was there) Dean had at least 3x as many people there as Kerry. To be honest, I am still a little amazed how quickly things fell apart.
Long, long ago, Democrats believed in limited government. Then the Socialist Party came along and started running candidates with the strategy of taking votes away from Democratic candidates. The Democrats had to start catering to Socialist interests in order to stop losing votes. I wish I had my copy of Lever Action on hand so I could quote the example given there: the 1932 platform of the Democratic Party called for limited government. The Socialist Party platform of the same year called for everything the Democratic Party stands for now: heavily progressive income tax, higher minimum wage, welfare state, more regulation of business, etc. The Democratic Party has become the Socialist Party in all but name.
Libertarians are in an even better position than the Socialists were, because we're capable of taking votes away from both the left and the right. Paleoconservatives who oppose preemptive war and "compassionate conservative" welfare programs are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the neocons who now run the Republican Party. At the same time, anti-war liberals don't like how much the Democrats support Bush's War in Iraq. The Libertarian Party can siphon off votes from both of these factions.
For example, the 2004 gubernatorial race in my home state of WA was decided by 127 votes. The Democrat, Gregoire, beat the Republican, Rossi, only after two recounts. The Libertarian candidate, Ruth Bennett, is openly lesbian and ran a campaign focused on gay rights, with the specific strategy of taking votes away from Gregoire. It worked. Bennett got 63,000+ votes. Remember that the margin of victory was only 127 votes. If even 1% of the Bennett supporters had voted for Gregoire instead, she would have won outright, without the need for two recounts.
You are correct that in the long run, the Libertarian Party will need to compromise with one or both of the major parties. However, the major parties won't compromise with us unless they have to. The only way to make them realize that they need to deal with us is by taking away their voters until they realize we are a force to be reckoned with. To that end, in the short run Libertarians MUST vote Libertarian instead of Democrat or Republican, and encourage any Libertarian-leaning friends or acquaintances to do the same. We'll either force them to compromise with us, as the Socialist Party did, or we'll supplant them entirely, in much the same way the Republican Party came to power over the Whigs.
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