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All right, two things about Howard Dean.
Posted by Plaid Adder
Added to homepage Thu Jun 09th 2005, 12:03 PM ET

All this stuff about how he's frightening/offending the "establishment Democrats." Well, I'll tell you why that is.

Whatever you think about the efficacy of what he's doing, nobody can deny that it's different. The reason he's DNC chairman in the first place is that the grassroots party workers realized that what the leadership did during the 2004 election cycle didn't work. So Dean is doing something different. May work, may not, but at least it's not the same shit they were doing in 2004.

Which means:

1) Of course people who were the leadership in 2004 think what he's doing is crazy. That's because it's the opposite of what they would do. That's not news, it's inevitable.

2) If what Dean is doing actually works...then it will mean that what the "establishment Democrats" were doing before was wrong, and that it probably cost us the election. Nobody wants to be convicted of that in front of the party and the media.

OF COURSE the people who though the 2004 strategy made sense think that Dean's doesn't. That's got nothing to do with Dean; it's to do with their own sense of themselves and the amount they have invested in doing things their way. And really, you can't blame them for standing up for the way they've always done it, because they must believe it's the right way or they wouldn't keep doing it.

BUT...let me just say that if the "establishment Democrats" could get the fucking job done, then John Kerry would be president right now. And he's not. So SOMETHING has got to be done differently.

Dean is doing it his way and who knows, maybe it will work. Maybe it won't, but at least someone will have EXPERIMENTED. We talk about how the Republican leadership just keeps making the same bullshit mistakes about Iraq, etc., and can't adjust even though what they're doing never seems to work. Well, our party leadership has been in the same kind of a rut, and something's got to get them out of it.

We're so afraid of being attacked in the media that we're afraid to try out new things. Look, folks, we will ALWAYS be attacked in the media. That's just the way it is now. It drives me crazy to see people talking about how if we just do this or that then the media will see how lovable we are and start reporting accordingly. No. We are never going to get the same kind of coverage the Republican Party gets from the mainstream media because we are not currently cracking the whip on the naked backs of their corporate masters. Dean knows, I hope anyway, that he is working with a media machine that is permanently set in "attack" mode, and figures, well, if they're gonna attack us, it may as well be for something good.

You gotta go at this beast with every possible strategy and hope that one of them works. The 'moderate' compromise on the filibuster has resulted in some sucky-ass judicial appointments but it may have done some other kinds of damage and if so, well, you take the bad with the good. But moderation alone does not accomplish anything when you are dealing with a juggernaut like the Bush administration.

In our household when we complain about some long-standing injustice, one of us will say to the other, jokingly, "Come the revolution..." Well, the revolution has come--but it's not the one we were looking for. THEY are having a revolution, while our party is standing around wondering what happened.

Someone has got to fight. People whose talents like in mediation and compromise, I salute you, and good luck doing your part, but SOMEONE has got to fight or we look like we don't have anything to fight for.

After 2004 I am done with waiting for men to deliver me. Dean is not the messiah come to lead the party out of Egypt and nobody else is either. They are all just career politicians who are trying to do their jobs as effectively as they know how to do it. Instead of wailing about how people are saying mean things about us in public because of him, why don't we just watch and see whether this works or not. It's too early to tell.

What we were already doing in 2004 did not work for us. There will have to be a change. Dean may or may not have hit on the way to make that change but if we are scared of change PERIOD then we are in really deep shit, because we sure need it.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

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