Hello Everybody,
I know that most of you have no use for Mickey Kaus. Myself, I quite appreciate his commentaries. But that's not the conversation I want to have here ...
No, more particularly, this is what is on my mind. In his latest Kausfiles, Kaus excoriates Dean for what Kaus considers some clumsy pandering to African-Americans (in an interview with the Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson).
I drafted an email to Kaus defending Dean, but I haven't sent it, because I'm not sure in the end that I agree with my defence of the Doctor, nor am I clear myself on what I think about politics and race in 2004.
So I thought I'd post my letter here, and see if anyone can help me make my case stronger, or point out why Kaus had it right in the first place, or educate me further about the issues involved.
Dear Mr. Kaus,
It pains me to say this, because I'm all for holding Howard Dean's feet to the fire, but I just read the Derrick Jackson column, and its central passages contradict your point (that Dean is unwilling to speak truth to black power).
From Jackson:
"That is Dean's icebreaker to get audiences to understand institutional racism. "The punch line of the story that it's so hard to find a qualified man is everybody does it. Everybody tends to hire people like themselves. And I get them all nodding, including the African-Americans in the audience."
He went on to talk about a consultant who runs political campaigns in Washington. The consultant was kept on to hire the staff for one of his candidates who won a city council race. "In the first staff meeting before the guy took office, they looked around and said, `Oh-oh.' Everyone was male, and everyone was African-American."
This was a softer Dean than the one excoriated by his competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination for saying he wanted to appeal to white guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. For all the fire of that moment, Dean said the Democrats cannot run away from a blunt, if gently blunt, discussion about race.
"Dealing with race is about educating white folks," Dean said in an interview Tuesday on a campaign swing through the first primary state where African-American voters will have a major impact. "Not because white people are worse than black people about race but because whites are in the majority, and therefore the behavior of whites has a much bigger influence on hiring practices and so forth and so on than the behavior of African-Americans.""
Notice [this is me again, not Jackson] that contra your claims, Jackson quotes Dean specifically as saying that blacks have problems with race too! Sure, Dean says it in a backhanded way ... But couldn't one characterize that as a "Clintonian" way of putting things across?
As for Dean's not addressing black responsibility for black social ills, a la Missy Elliott, just because Jackson doesn't quote Dean to that effect doesn't mean he's not capable of taking such a line. What's more, the sort of uplift Elliott is rapping about transcends race (her words could just as well, and no doubt do, inspire "white trash" to work hard and play by the rules). Dean is defining racial issues more narrowly, and by that definition what he says about "educating white folks" seems true enough (if, yes, maybe a bit "clueless" or tone-deaf to how patronizing it might sound).
To be sure, Dean doesn't strike me as quite the civil rights visionary that he likes to style himself to be. But he's a politician, I grant him a few pretences.
I know it's part of your job to play the gotcha game with Dean, but you have to actually get him to get him ... Otherwise you're just (gasp) repeating the CW ... !
Your frequent reader,
"Ottoe"