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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."
Psst...
Gay rights are not a core Democratic platform. Every democratic presidentcal candidate EVER has been against Gay marriage. At the most expansionist, they're in favor of it being up to the states.
(Gay rights are included within a few other party ideals, but they're hardly a major issue.)
... As long as I can't realistically vote libertarian in a presidential election, this is the lesser of the major evils. I like Dean, too. Sure would have preferred him, but I digress.
/. I imagine do, you should try and vote libertarian in your local and even congressional elections.
But, if you lean that LP way, and alot on
What Libertarians actually support.
Go LP!
~Rebecca
Struck a cord with the common man? Come on, Howard Dean was a joke, and it shows there is a leadership problem at the top of the Dem party.
I agree with you that Dean wasn't the one striking a chord with the common man, but I don't think that was the reason. As much as I, and many here, hate George W. Bush, the reason he's in office is "striking a chord with the common man."
He comes off as "common man" with his poor speaking abilities. He goes to schools, and reads stories to children. He went out in the crowd of terrified family members after 9/11, shaking hands and pausing to listen to frightened citizens stories. Then shortly after, he stood up and told the country that he was going to make us safer, and make it alright.
"Common men" don't care about secret tribunals, election fraud, attacking the wrong guy, invading soveriegn nations, alienating the world, or any of that stuff that "nerds" (of all types) care about. They want to be told that their leader empathizes with them, and that by golly, he's going to make it right. That's the stuff that makes the "common man" sleep easy at night.
~Rebecca
What I can't believe is how far to the right this country's shifted so quickly. What was the center in 2000 is now the 'extreme left' today. Dean's a proper left-leaning democrat, not a republican-wannabe apologist.
The right's gotten a strong wind recently, and we need to fight back accordingly, not start letting go of core values. And it's well-needed, even with such a poor candidate as Kerry, we still got 48%* of the electorate. Kerry ignored most of the issues at hand and only attacked Bush's strongpoints. I don't think Dean will let our newer candidates make the same mistakes.
Maybe I'm an old romantic, but I don't think homophobia (gay rights), subordination of women (abortion), warmongering (iraq), and the extortion of the lower classes (taxes, social security) are American values.
--
* debates over the remnants of fair voting aside
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"But his views on things like health care, welfare, social security, environmental policy, tax reform and foreign policy range from the standard liberal platform to extremism."
Here is a translation for those people who don't speak extreme wingnuttian...
Dean's Views on:
Google really should develop a language tool for extreme wingnuttian.
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.
The thing is, it doesn't really matter if he's crazy. Neither of us know how to spell the outgoing chairman's name. If the Dems had a candidate you liked, why would you vote against that candidate just because the chairman's a loon? His personal angry attidute will forever prevent him from being president, but as a chairman what matters is his organizing and fundraising skills, and perhaps his willingness to think outside establishment terms. The man has good ideas, he's just completely inappropriate for the public eye.
He may be overly antagonistic, but the Republicans managed to succeed despite having twice as much hate and venom as the Democrats--and at least Leftist hate is just anger at another point of view, not Ann Coulter-style racism. It was Kerry and the party establishment's attempt to seem moderate that doomed the campaign. Besides, if you were willing to go with Zell Miller, you've got no right to talk about venom.
It's good that he's a fiscal conservative. We might expect a lot of former Republicans (like myself--I voted for Bush in 2000) to realize their party no longer cares about fiscal conservatism--it's just big government for the sake of big business. The medical overhaul Bush insisted on is a great example of that--he has promised to veto any attempt to limit the windfall to drug companies. As politics switches its focus to domestic issues, Dean could end up looking like a moderate.
The promising thing about Dean is that he knows its not about moving to the center--Americans won't respect someone who capitulates for political convenience. But he also understands that strategic retreats are necessary on certain lost cause issues--like gun control.
The worrying thing about Dean and the Democratic party in general is that they've misunderstood the power of the internet and decentralized organization. They see it in terms of collecting money and volunteers to send to campaign in other states. But that's a foolish plan--people are alienated by out of staters coming to convince them to change their minds, as Dean should have learned in Iowa and Kerry should have learned in Ohio. Instead, internet resources should be aimed at getting people engaged in their own communities--whether its just getting people to volunteer in their own neighborhoods or even encourage people to run for local offices.
Dean is not actually very far left. He is liberal, to be sure, but not in a bleeding heart, knee-jerk kind of way. He was painted with a far left brush based solely on the fact that he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.
Sad but true. Gay rights are not a core Democratic issue. But they SHOULD be. Democrats are having a hard time distinguishing themselves from Republicans. No one believes that they're in favor of fiscal responsibility, or that their position on Iraq is viable.
But if they remade themselves as the Party of Tolerance, I think they could do a lot better. They could brand the Republicans as intolerant, exclusionist, backwards. They could make gay rights into the Civil Rights struggle of the new generation that it will inevitably be and call themselves the champions of it. They could personalize all of the anti-gay policies the GOP pushes under the sterile cover of "protecting the sanctity of marriage." Put some very charismatic, very likable gay people on TV. Have them tell their stories. "Why does President Bush hate this man? Why doesn't he deserve the right to marry someone he loves? Why does the Republican Party think they're more moral than him, when he's just trying to live his life with the hand God dealt him?" The Republicans are VERY vulnerable on this front, and the Democrats could make a lot of headway pushing at it. They could also make the world a much better place.
Dean is clearly on the left side of the spectrum, but BushCo is much more clearly on the *FAR* right side. The rightwingers have become so dominant that the system is falling out of balance, and there are basically only two outcomes now. One possible outcome is a swing back to the left, and Dean is of course going to be pushing for that. The stronger the swing to the right, the stronger the counterswing will have to be.
The other possible outcome would be bankruptcy and collapse. The United States has already lasted far longer than the average government, and it's showing plenty of symptoms of the kind of senility that often appears before a government collapses.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Well, as a Democrat, I remember a time when the Democrats were in control of both the White House and Congress, and I was feeling very optimistic and warm'n'fuzzy about my party, and a lot of Republicans were talking about the devastation of their party and how they had to compromise and accomodate themselves to the new political realities ... and all of a sudden the most visible Republican politician in the country was this screaming firebrand, who was stereotyped as a far right-winger (he wasn't, really, but both his supporters and his opponents seemed to like to paint him that way) who had A Master Plan to lead his party back to power.
And as a Democrat, I was rubbing my hands with glee. This guy is a nutcase, I thought. He'll take the Republicans down into permanent ruin. They're finished. I can't believe they let this guy get this much power. Heh heh heh.
That politician's name was Newt Gingrich.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.