Howard Dean has read this nation so well it is almost scary. Here we are post-election talking about the right wing cultural attack and Diebold. Of course, most Democrats are talking about the right wing cultural attack from a wimpy DLC point of view. There were at least two big op-ed pieces from Democrats in the
Mercury News yesterday saying how we need to become more like the other side in order to appeal to middle America.
But Howard Dean has espoused a better plan. Let's rewind back to December:
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla., Dec. 7 -- Former Vermont governor Howard Dean on Sunday accused the Republican Party of purposely dividing the country over "guns, God and gays" and "stirring up racial prejudices" to win presidential elections.
"In 1968, [Republican] Richard Nixon won the White House," Dean said in remarks prepared for delivery in South Carolina. "He did it in a shameful way: by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people. They called it the southern strategy, and the Republicans have been using it ever since." Republicans deny they divide the nation over race.
Dean said the time has come for political leaders to move beyond divisive issues and toward harmony on issues of "common interest" such as education and jobs. "It's time we had a new politics in America -- a politics that refuses to pander to our lowest prejudices," he said.
He's right, you know. Our duty as a party is to CHANGE the way people think, not to go through the standard marketing exercise where X message theoretically yields X votes in X area. But changing minds is very hard work. It requires resources to figure out how to talk to Southern moderates in such a way so that economic and world issues become more important than cultural issues when the time comes to vote. Howard Dean, and more eloquently, Barack Obama, realize this and speak this way. Perhaps Dean was forced to consider this when the media kept asking him how he was going to win in the South. Too bad no one ever asked Kerry how HE was going to win in the South. Obviously his campaign thought his military service would be enough. So to recap lesson #1:
Howard Dean understands that Democrats will only win by convincing Southerners that economic and world issues are more important than cultural issues. We will not win by trying to co-opt Republican cultural issues, because the GOP is firmly entrenched there. This will take time and investment, (which Dean undoubtedly would have been willing to provide). Minds do not change over night. The GOP will continue to slap mud on Democrats and drive wedges. And in the midst of all this our party will have to alleviate anxiety about our moral values enough in those areas so that economic issues come to the fore when the time comes to vote. I suspect that we will have to show how our moral values actually do things like reduce abortion rates, reduce divorce rates, and are completely pro-family. More importantly, we have to be very repetitive. Democrats are famous for espousing a great idea. Once. Then that's it. I have to say that this could not have been done by Dean or anyone else in one election cycle, so he probably would not have won by doing this. But this is a long-term strategy which is necessitated by the electoral vote chart and demographics. We might say that Howard could have been our Barry Goldwater had we nominated him.
Okay, about Diebold. Howard Dean was right there, too. Deaniacs everywhere grasped the importance of this issue very early on and were able to convince Dean that it was a problem. This issue almost achieved traction when California's SoS Kevin Shelley filed lawsuits against Diebold and required that the state have paper trails by 2006. But at some point, the Democratic campaign disengaged itself from this issue. On Air America this morning, someone was talking about how he actually met Kerry, brought up the issue, and knew immediately that nothing would get done. McAuliffe kept bleating about how we would have lawyers everywhere, as though a lawyer at a polling place can see someone awarding 4,000 votes for Bush in a place that only has 600 voters. So, had the party pushed as hard as Dean and Shelley (who unfortunately is toast politically for other reasons), all the way through to election day, we would be in a position to challenge the Ohio vote. As things stand, it is really awkward to come back now and claim the computers suck. I mean, some are starting to do it now, but the only realistic hope is that we can prevent the problem in future elections, because we are still at the stage where we are trying to convince people in our party that it is a problem.
OK, so while we all KNEW that Dean was right about the war all along, it turns out that two OTHER issues he was right about were really key to campaign 2004. The sad thing is that after the 1964 campaign, there was a strong majority of Republicans backing the idea that they could make their unpopular ideas popular over the long haul. I fear that as a Party we are not even to that place yet. When are we going to realize that politics is much more than a marketing exercise?