13th Jan 2004
Dump Dean, Back Clark Against Bush
From an email I just sent my Dad, a Dean supporter:
I just finished this long profile of Dean in the New Yorker
Overall, I guess I feel a bit more favorable about him — personally, anyway — after having read it. When you profile someone so closely, there’s a lot to his character. He sounds thoughtful, well-intentioned and so forth. I also do admire how effectively he’s tapped a popular movement, bucked conventions, so effectively used the Internet, his whole populist verve — even though the profile repeatedly makes it seem like he’s more surprised than anyone that this success so far has fallen in his lap.
My initial dislike of him was based primarily on seeing him handle himself on TV a few times where he just comes off too self-satisfied to my liking. Particularly at the first debate of the Dems candidates, he just had a shit-eating grin the whole time like he thought he was too smooth. Really rubbed me the wrong way.
In any event, my biggest problem is I just think he’s unelectable. I think this election is too important for us to pick a candidate who speaks his mind, appeals to the angry far-left and so forth, if he’s only going to get trounced by Bush in the end, which I am sure is what would happen if the two ran head to head. He’s simply not appealing to Middle America, conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans and the whole middle “swing voters” of the electorate. I think the Left would be cutting off its nose to spite its face to make him the Democratic candidate.
Here’s an excerpt from the profile that speaks to this, the second paragraph in particular:
Will Marshall, who runs the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank offshoot of the D.L.C., suggested to me that not only was Dean both philosophically out of step with his own party and hypocritically disingenuous but he was also exploiting liberal resentment that has simmered ever since the centrists commandeered the Democratic Party during the nineties (though much of the left was reasonably content while Clinton was in the White House). Dean was essentially a centrist, Marshall said, who had leveraged his opposition to the war, broadening it so that “the centrist morphs into this full-throated tribune of left-leaning activists.”
“At the bottom,” Marshall continued, “is this left-wing fantasy of a mass mobilization of disaffected voters, a belief that if we?re only left enough and pure enough in our hatred we?ll create this mass movement. The intensity Dean has tapped into is narrow. There’s no question he’s got the most enthusiastic base of support out there. But, however intensely you feel for Howard Dean, you only have one vote. Intensity is important in politics, but you?ve also got to have breadth. I don’t believe they?ve proven that they’ve tapped into this whole new reservoir of support. That’s what makes the Dean campaign reminiscent of McGovern’s — it’s the postgraduate proletariat, on the two coasts, plus a dollop of Hollywood liberals. It could be that our electoral market analysis is suddenly wrong. Maybe the country has shifted several quantum degrees to the left. Maybe I took a long nap and missed it.”
I’m behind Wesley Clark, so much so, in fact, that I’ve decided to volunteer for his campaign, which is something I’ve never done before. I really believe Clark is the best one to beat Bush. My friend M., for example, a life-long Republican, said Clark is the only one of the Democrats he would consider voting for. I think he’s solid on all the issues (liberal everywhere it counts: environment, abortion, race, rich vs. poor, multilateral relations, etc.), strong on international issues (much unlike Dean), has a masters degree in economics (and is a Rhodes scholar), and, with his general stripes, can out-position Bush in terms of credibility on national security, international affairs, and so on. And, critically, he’ll appeal much more to that middle, to liberal Republicans, to military people and others who, I’m sure, would vote for Bush over Dean.
If the party nomination goes to Dean, I’m sure that means we’ll get Bush a second time around. As David Letterman said when Gore endorsed Dean, “The guy who got beat by Bush just endorsed the guy who’s going to get beat by Bush.”
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