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The Incredible Lightness of DeanBy Rick Horowitz
What a kick it must be to be Howard! Howard Dean, that is. He's got a fancy title -- Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He gets invited onto all the Sunday-morning talk shows. He gets to zip back and forth across the country rallying the troops. He must have a zillion Frequent Flyer miles. He gets to say any damned fool thing that pops into his head. What a kick. (Who knew The Scream was just his warm-up act?) I mean, what a kick compared to being a little-noticed governor of a little-noticed state, which is what Howard Dean used to be before he went meteoric as an outspoken, dark-horse presidential candidate. This has to be absolute mind candy! Everywhere you go, people cheer. Every time you speak, it's big news. And needless to say, over at party headquarters, they're eating it up. Republican party headquarters, that is. Howard Dean is the biggest break for the Republicans since John Kerry decided not to release his just-as-lousy-as-George's grades before the election. Howard Dean is to reasoned discourse what Paris Hilton is to modesty. I'll pause here to give outraged Howard Dean fans a chance to retrieve the newspapers they've just flung across the room. (Paris Hilton fans don't actually read newspapers, so there's no -- See? That's exactly the kind of gratuitous insult I'm talking about! It's so much fun to say it, and then you have to spend the next week or two defending it and explaining it and trying to get out from under it, while everything else you might have said before it and after it is instantly and totally ignored. Is this a good thing? Well, it's certainly a fun thing -- if you don't care about winning. If you do care about winning, though, it's wasted effort. And worse than that: It's counterproductive. Declaring the GOP "pretty much a white, Christian party," or saying that many Republicans "have never made an honest living in their lives" may be red meat in the blue states, but you've already got the blue states. Last time I looked, the blue states don't add up to 270 electoral votes. So now what? How do you get from here to there? ("Here" being the wilderness, and "there" being 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) Well, I guess you could try to do it the Howard Dean way -- slam the Republicans long enough and hard enough that energized Democrats by the millions suddenly come out of the woodwork and sweep the other guys aside. Or you could take a reality pill, and notice that the Republicans are at least as clever as you are at expanding their base of true believers. So your numbers may go up, but so will theirs. And along the way, they'll manage to shift the focus from the substance of your argument to the ill-considered phrasing of your latest outburst. Then you'll stamp your feet and complain that they're just looking for a distraction from the bad news on the war and on job insecurity and pension insecurity and ethics and... Of course they're looking for a distraction! So why keep providing one? It's like Bill Clinton, knowing that his enemies would seize on the slightest stumble to try to take him down -- and then taking up with Monica. There's dumb, and then there's incredibly dumb. So now what? How about taking some of their votes away from them? Some of their not-so-true believers, for instance -- the millions of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who have to be growing increasingly uncomfortable in a party moving farther and farther to the right, a party that's controlled more and more by the evangelicals and the fundamentalists, a party whose agenda seems to have lost touch with the concerns of average voters. Howard Dean is certainly old enough to remember 1972, when it took the GOP about a minute and a half to announce that the Democratic Party had been "captured" by its "McGovernite wing," and to offer distressed Democrats a new home. Don't you think there are Republicans today who feel likewise about the capture of their party by the "Falwell/Dobson/Robertson/DeLay wing"? How about offering these people a plausible alternative? Or you could just stick with the Howard Dean way, and insult them and ridicule them and give them no option but to stay exactly where they are. I'm not saying go easy on the Republicans -- not at all. I'm saying go effective. Choose your targets for denunciation, and your targets for persuasion. Recognize the difference. And then choose your weapons accordingly. What's the difference between Howard Dean and the average blogger? The blogger has some self-control. Posted 6/14/05. Get
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Rick Horowitz
