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From
Tweedle Dick to Tweedle Dean:
Ho-hum
Democrats Get Ready to Blow Another Chance
by
Daniel Patrick Welch
August
22, 2003
One
would think that enough has been said in the realm of blowing Howard Dean's
liberal cover. An outpouring of research and truth-telling from the left has
left, at least on my own palette, a distaste for Dean rivaled only by that I
feel for Joe Lieberman. The fury has been so relentless, that even the Nation
(original source of the Dean is No Wellstone warning shot) has felt it
necessary to issue a revision of sorts, noting, among other tidbits, that a
surprising number of Nation staffers, some self-described leftists, are still
stuck on Dean despite his having been successfully outed-or so we thought. .
One
new mantra is that Dean is being "picked on." The Nation points out
that, despite seemingly favorable coverage, the press just doesn't seem to like
him personally. It seems a bit disingenuous, though, to fault the media, whose
obsession with Dean, and in particular, whose collusion in sculpting Dean's
image as a liberal has catapulted him to the forefront. And yet the mislabeling
continues. Hugo Young writes a brilliant analysis in the Guardian ("American
Voters Have Two Choices: Bush or Bush-lite,") However, even Young
mischaracterizes Dean as "the most lefty of the candidates." This is
demonstrably untrue. Many candidate's positions are exactly along the lines of
what Young seems to advise: that Democrats need to "abandon their backing
and filling, and their belief that being a Democrat no longer adds up to
anything more than a milder version of their enemies."
True,
the liberals in the race are indeed lagging in the polls, if these are of any
value beyond name recognition at this stage-and many pundits will defend their
facile mislabeling by qualifying that they are focused on "the viable candidates." Until one
of these campaign yields tangible results in the primaries, they will continue
to be dismissed. But this quasi-left image, carefully nurtured by Dean's
supporters, belies his true positions on the issues. Even if we dismiss the
liberals, the fact is that Dean's own rhetoric places him squarely in the
middle of the triangulating camp decried by Young and so many others,
including, it seems, most Dean supporters, were their man subjected to a blind
taste test a la Pepsi v. Coke.
But
don't take my word for it. The Democratic Leadership Council, the right wing of
the Democrats, until recently touted Dean as "just the kind of centrist,
New Democratic governor" needed to reform the party (i.e., move it, in
Young's turn of phrase, 'so far into the orbit of its rival as to render itself
meaningless'). This is, of course, anathema to the left wing of the party, such
as it is, not to mention the left in general. But far from being the man of the
moment to rescue the country from this asphyxiating me-tooism, Dean is instead
the very epitome of it-every bit as much as the bulk of his rivals for the
nomination. By trying to portray his agenda as more "left" than it
actually is, Dean is delegitimizing exactly the kind of challenge from the left
that might revive anti-Bush forces. While the press is generally focused on
Dean's "anger at Bush," or his willingness to "take on
Bush," few delve more deeply.
Dean's
faux-left image is dangerous, and, despite his supporters almost fanatic belief
to the contrary, is actually a hindrance to building a coalition that will
"take back America." Go ahead and be 'tough on crime' if you are
deluded enough to think it can buy a few (white) votes in Texas (or worse, if
you really think the problem with the greatest Prison Nation on earth is that
we are somehow incarcerating too few people). Just don't pretend it's something
it's not. Try to keep in mind, though, that we live in an age where the
extremist cabal in Washington stole the election, in part, by exploiting the
disenfranchisement of ex-felons, real and imagined, to get where they are.
Scrubbing these disproportionately minority voters is a key element of stealing
and keeping power in the GOP grand strategy-in Florida it alchemized a loss
into a win, and casts the same, long racist shadow over much of the Old
Confederacy. With more black men in prison than in college, "tough on
crime" has long been establishment code for institutionalized racism.
Charles Ogletree commented, in the lead up to the Michigan decision, that a
society whose army is all brown and whose law schools are all white has a
serious problem. Those who miss the moral reasons might at least be coaxed for
demographic and logistical ones that such "toughness" depends on
perspective, and that pissing on your own margin of victory does have its down
side. What many of us feel is that it is more difficult, not less, to win such
a cynical campaign. And to do so is to try to raise an obscene amount of money,
even if it means backing away from the one hard-won mechanism--matching funds
and spending limits--that might be built on to rescue the political process
from the monied cesspool in which it now festers. And Dean is making noises
about doing just that.
This
is not picking on Howard Dean, no matter what the more thin-skinned of his
protectors might say. The point is that Dean is no different from his more
mealy-mouthed rivals except in the packaging that surrounds an old message: a
DLC puzzle, surrounded by an antiwar enigma, wrapped into a media hype mystery.
The part that makes the left's blood boil is that he pretends to be different.
But in Dean's own words: "I was a triangulator before Clinton was a triangulator."
The most noted of his "left" positions, his so-called antiwar stance,
is also fraught with holes. As a state executive, Dean has been free to wax
(and wane) philosophical on his views about the war, never backed into the
corner of commiting himself to a singular course of action.
From
outside the federal realm of responsiblity, he can project a skepticism about
the war which belies any actual positions. He was not a fixture at antiwar
protests, unlike some of the other candidates; he, like Kerry, thought it
appropriate to temper his criticism "while the troops were on the
ground." More insidiously, he has couched his "antiwar"
criticism in the same triangulating language of the rest of the loyal (and
useless) opposition--it's just that he has been given a free pass for it. He
has mused, on occasion, on the need for more troops in Iraq, not an end to the
occupation. He talks casually about the eventually downsizing and privatization
of Iraq state-run concerns, as if Milton Friedman had given him special
tutoring on the issue. He has talked of taking a tougher line on Syria and
Iran, whatever that might mean. Short of a crystal ball, it is fairly safe to
say that he would almost certainly have voted for the war resolution along with
Gephardt and Kerry, or taken Graham's conservative line, voting against the
resolution because it didn't go far enough.
In
an interview
with The Forward Dean took pains to distance himself from the more liberal
Peace Now agenda, going even as far as to say that his appearance on behalf of
a friend at a Peace Now function should in no way be misconstrued as promoting
its agenda. His own view, he offered without prompting, was closer to that of
the conservative AIPAC, which Tikkun and other liberal groups vehemently oppose.
It
gets worse. With qualified support for the death penalty, an A rating from the
NRA, and a no-nonsense pride in being "tough on crime," it is simply
astounding that Dean and his supporters have managed to avoid the Bush-lite
death sentence that is thankfully hounding the likes of Lieberman, and I
suspect, Graham and Edwards as well. On civil liberties, usually the sacred cow
of left politics in America, Dean may be even worse. He has used the language
and approach of the right in dismissing civil rights questions in criminal
trials as "technicalities," or "constitutional
hangups." His presidential run has jogged the memory of some
Vermonters who have roundly criticized him for what some feel is a gutting of
their ability to defend poor and indigent clients [TalkLeft: More on Howard
Dean and Criminal Defendants]. On these issues and more he cannot honestly
stand to the left of one or many of his rivals: Kerry on capital punishment,
Gephardt on health care, Braun, Kucinich and Sharpton on the whole kit and
kaboodle. Make no mistake: those who argue that Dean is the progressive wing's
hope for "taking back America" are saying no different than their
counterparts in hold-your-nose-elections past: shut up and get on board; and
don't make waves or we'll give you even less.
You
may or may not see the party as a whole capable of emerging from its long
slumber to effectively challenge one-party rule by the right. There may be a
few embers glowing yet in the ash of the party that once embraced the struggle
to end American apartheid. The largely ignored center-left vote of 2000 offered
a ray of hope, the opposition party's pathetic response to which quickly
dashed.
Most
on the left feel, with not a little justification, that any Democrat who
defeats Bush will be committed to such a large portion of his agenda that the
war on terror, war on drugs, assault on the poor and global control of
corporations will rage virtually unabated--prompting the notion that defeating
Bush is a necessary but not sufficient component of this change. Any chance at
breaking this cycle must come from the left, with a true, people-focused agenda
based on principle and substance and not on the mere rhetoric of opposition.
One thing we don't need a crystal ball for is to know that Howard
Dean is not the vehicle for this change in direction.
Daniel Patrick
Welch lives and
writes in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde.
Together they run The Greenhouse School. He has appeared on radio [interview
available here]. Past articles and translations are available at www.danielpwelch.com.
©
2003 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted.
* We Were Just
Talking: (Yet ) Another Conversation About Dennis Kucinich