Posted on 02/13/2005 4:54:10 AM PST by johnny7
As New Chairman, He Must Reach Democrats Beyond The Northeast
WASHINGTON -- The joke being whispered around the Democratic Party meeting this weekend is that when Howard Dean thinks of the South, he thinks of New York.
But the line is not all that funny, not even to New Englanders, because it capsulizes the trouble Democrats face as they try to regroup - now with Dean as their party chairman - and re-emerge from what is widely perceived as a disastrous 2004. This is a party with a big image problem, that it's too beholden and too closely identified with the Northeast - New England and the New York metropolitan area. In the political world, the perception is that residents of this region routinely tolerate higher taxes and embrace abortion rights, civil unions and lavish spending on social programs.
This image is creating two opposite reactions that Democrats have been struggling with and have not fully resolved: New Englanders bristle and insist that they deserve to have a strong voice in the party, while others outside the region worry that the party is controlled by Brahmins such as John Kerry or brash liberals such as Dean. "We're relying too heavily on that [New England] base," said former party Chairman Don Fowler of South Carolina.
Now that Dean - governor of Vermont for 11 years and the party's front-running presidential candidate through most of 2003 - was elected on a voice vote Saturday as national Democratic chairman, that base retains its perch atop the party structure. There was a distinct air of defensiveness among New England officials this weekend at the Democratic National Committee's winter meeting. While their region gave presidential nominee Kerry all its 34 electoral votes, and now has the party's chairman, members were concerned their expertise and views would be all but ignored as Dean makes a determined effort to show he has more than regional appeal. Dean is making the standard pledges to include all views, vowing to give "disproportionate" attention to Southern and Western states that Democrats tended to skip over last year. Party members from the South and West, as well as top officials of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, argue one starting point for that dialogue is to talk more about the party's fealty to God and values, as many Republicans do.
Sure enough, as Democratic National Committee members walked into the Hilton Washington hotel, site of the party meeting, they were greeted by a "Dean for Chairman" table with a handout titled "Howard Dean & the Moral Center." The two-page text was actually a series of comments the Rev. Jesse Jackson made to Democrats last week explaining why Dean would find that center. "Howard Dean knows how to deliver health care to children. That's fighting for the moral center," Jackson said. "Where's the moral center in the Bush/Cheney Iraq policy?" Exactly, said New Hampshire state Rep. Marcia Moody. New Englanders also want to talk about values, she said, but that doesn't necessarily mean a public debate over how to worship God. "Values means not letting others suffer. It means providing health care, or Social Security to those who most need it," she said. John Olsen, president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and a former state party chairman, cited good schools.
While Democrats from other parts of the country don't argue that point, they say they do want the values debate to sound like something more than a way to expand increasingly expensive social programs. They want more efforts aimed at people who attend religious services regularly, have serious reservations about gay marriage or see an ever-coarsening culture veering out of parental control. "We have to use language that resonates with people in Ohio," said Patricia Moss, an AFSCME president from Columbus. "There's a sense we've just been forgotten," added Norma Fisher Flores, an insurance agent from El Paso.
Kerry helped fuel that feeling. He competed hard in only about 20 states, most of them in the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast. "You got this impression that they put their resources where they had a chance of winning and forgot about the rest of us," said Susan McHugh, president of Utah Democratic Women, and as a result, her state got little attention or money from the party for state and local races. Yet New England is too powerful, too loyal to be dismissed. "Just look at the intellectual resources," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. And consider the financial resources for campaigns, added Massachusetts Democratic Chairman Phil Johnston. The Northeast is ``a big exporter of money to the whole country." What's needed in 2008, Fowler said, is a presidential candidate who speaks the plain language of the South and West. That's something Democrats have been grappling with since the party fractured over the Vietnam War in 1968.
Since then, the only successful Democratic candidates for president have been from Southern states. Democrats have won the White House only three times since 1968, and because it was so hard to expand the party's reach, even the winning Southerners needed more than just their regional ties to prevail. In 1976, the party won because of disgust over the Watergate scandal, Fowler said. And in 1992 and 1996, won by President Clinton, "you had a candidate with an unusual personal appeal." Republicans, meanwhile, won every other presidential election with a Texan or Californian at the top of the ticket. Today, virtually all of their top officeholders have those accents Fowler covets - President Bush, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee. New England, though, is not going to go quietly from the Democratic Party, especially now that Dean is the chairman. "Everyone thinks that people in New England are a bunch of people who never go to church. But we do. We're not a bunch of Godless communists," said Martin J. Dunleavy of New Haven, director of the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council. Exhibit A is Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the party's 2000 vice presidential candidate who for years has stood consistently with Republicans and like-minded Democrats to condemn excessive sex and violence in the media.
Dean himself has been visiting with members in Washington since Thursday, dismissing any notion he's too liberal or too regional - and he and others said the chairman is the party's chief administrator and fund-raiser, not its policy spokesman.
On paper, Dean should have little trouble translating his Vermont experiences to a national stage. But logic is one thing; image is another, and that's the quandary the party faces. It tried hard this weekend to put forth a more diverse geographic face - at its first major session Friday, the featured speakers were former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, its 2004 vice presidential candidate; Pelosi; New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Their words sounded much the same as those of Dean or, for that matter, Kerry.
But for the next few years, the face of the party again will be that of a New Englander. That's why Texas steelworkers' union official John Patrick, like a lot of others, did not initially back Dean for chairman, and, like many at the meeting, has a tough standard he wants Dean to meet. "I want to give the impression," Patrick said, "that we want this to be more of a national party."
Yup... give'm an impression... a hollow facade... that's enough to fool the bastid's! What raw intellect!.
“In the political world, the perception is that residents of this region routinely tolerate higher taxes and embrace abortion rights, civil unions and lavish spending on social programs.”
YOU DON'T SAY!! What do these idiots need? To be hit in the head with a hammer?! CT is wants to follow suit with MA to get gay-marriage. They will try with the Legislature. If that fails, I'm sure their Supreme Court has a 'little something' in mind.
Actually Montana has a far higher tax rate that the Northeast. The Democrats problem is they try to be republican lite. And what this does is send a signal that they are simply postering to win an election, and don't agree with Right-wing principles, they want thier cake and to eat it also, so to speak.
Keep in mind, george Bush is from the Northeast, he also attended Yale (So Did I).
The Democrat Party destroys itself, The democrat establishment sought to destroy dean in Iowa and did. They fear losing thier power to some, grassroots loving, populist like dean. They are elitists and it threatens their power. I was starting to see the party in a better light, before they became cowardly and chose Kerry as the Nominee, because he is more electable, that right their showed me they care more about power than principal. Then I had to remind myself the Libertarian party is the party of Principle.
"I want to give the impression," Patrick said, "that we want this to be more of a national party."
It's the Clinton way!
It's going to be fun to watch. When Dean tries to go toward the center, watch the DUmmies start to scream.
It's going to absolutely fracture the party (at least the looney left part) because Dean, as DNC chairman, won't be who they expect him to be.
They want him to be the fire breathing candidate that he was in 2003, but everybody knows where that got him.
He will try to moderate, I think, (I'd like it if he stayed the looney lib that he is, but I think he'll try to go middle of the road), and when he does, the DUers will be distraught.
Personallyl I'm looking forward to seeing them try to imitate the rest of us -- kind of like watching Paul Anka try to do hip hop, only from the other side of the fence (or that photo of Pat Boone in leather ... )
It ought to be a real game show and I'm going to enjoy it.
Dean FORCED Civil Unions on Vermont. Vermonter's did not want CU.
Dean with his ramrod style will end up sinking the dem party for a long time...
Dean is the epidomy of the arrogant prickish dumbass left.
Where was Hill in all of this? That military think tank meeting in Europe? Interesting.
Values means 'not letting others suffer'.
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They can pound sand. We have to suffer through DNC bull****.
I thought lefties were already pretty fractured to being with...
I thought lefties were already pretty fractured to begin with...
You mean when like when he said:
"I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."
Wrong word, wrong tense. It's not past (been), it's present tense, and the verb is avoided, as in, "We're being avoided", which is what really is happening by anyone with a lick of sense who doesn't want to (for instance) have our enlightened, benevolent government pay the legal fees to allow gays to adopt.
The perception also is that residents from this region are arrogant,condescending,impatient and all around unpleasant people.
Unfortunately this perception of NYC liberals does`nt come by accident.They seem to take great pains to prove it to be true.
That's right Martin, you do. And you support abortion, gay marriage, higher taxes, and a give-up foreign policy.
Any way you slice it, it's still baloney.
Is that why Dean is so far, far left while talking about moving right?
If the Supreme Court fails, no doubt liberal judge a-hole activist CHATIGNY [the Klintoon-appointed moron judge who essentially stepped in and stopped the execution of serial killer Michael Ross] will unilaterally allow gay marriage in CT.
Pres. George Bush our Pres. was not born in Texas but was born in New Haven Ct. If you ask most American where he was born almost all would say Texas.
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