Deconstructing
David Brooks
My fellow Democrats, it's good to be back in New Hampshire today. But I'd like to throw away my stump speech and talk honestly about the state of this campaign. I am losing. Howard Dean is crushing me. He has money. He has a movement. And he's had one other big advantage: no opposition.
Yes, the other Democrats are all losers, but you need to pay attention to them anyway
Oh sure, we sniped at him at times. We pointed out his flip-flops and his gaffes. But Dean's core strength is that he is tough enough to stand up to the Republicans. His supporters don't care if he's flip-flopped on issues or if he makes a gaffe or two. They just want to know he can take on Karl Rove.
Oh the horror! He actually stands up to the Republicans. Before you know it, he will be objecting to judicial nominees!
Howard Dean is liberal aggression, and none of us have ever taken that on until today. But now I am relaunching my campaign around one simple slogan: Stop the War.
That would be the Iraq mission accomplished"war", wouldn't it?
Nope, wrong war.
I don't mean the war in Iraq. I mean the war at home. I mean the partisan war between Republicans and Democrats that rages every day in Washington and produces behavior that would be unacceptable in any other arena of life.
Oh, that war. I understand now.
I mean the war that poisons our airwaves, clogs up our best-seller lists and stagnates our politics. I've lived at the front: it's in Washington, D.C. This is World War I.
Always ready for some good old delusion of grandeur. Our two political parties are not getting along and it is World War.and David Brooks would know all about WWI. Sure.
Each party has its trench works. Each party has its heavy artillery. Anybody who dares wander from the predictable party lines and do something unorthodox gets his head blown off. Nothing ever changes. If Dean is our nominee, he may fight the Beltway wars more aggressively than other Democrats, but we will still be a nation at war.
Lets see now: Ann Coulter, Fox News Channel, Mark `the Great one' Levin, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh on one side. On the other side - Alan Colmes. Yep, each side has equal artillery pointed at each other.
I have seen Dean up close. The man hates his opponents. His kind ! thrives only during times of domestic war. If we nominate Dean, it will be bad for our party and bad for our country.
If we nominate Dean (and we have already established that he has the balls to stand up to the Republicans), he might win and it would be a bad thing for Democrats.
This is the root of David Brooks' thesis. Dean is Mean and he will make the political climate worse.
It will be bad for our party because 40 percent of the voters in this nation call themselves moderates. If we nominate Dean, George Bush will have a good shot at winning a large chunk of those votes. That's disgraceful after the partisan way George Bush has led this country. But it will be our fault because we nominated someone just as partisan on the other side.
I must confess that David lost me here. Let us see: Dean is full of partisan rhetoric. Bush has actually acted in a blatantly partisan fashion. But faced with a choice, the `moderate' voter will choose Partisan Bush, and not Partisan Dean.
But suppose Dean does win the White House. He'll propose some good legislation. I'll support it, but it will never get passed. Because each party will still be down in its trenches, and nothing will move except the bouncing of the rubble and the writhing of the wounded.
That's very good - the writhing of the wounded. Dean will propose good legislation and the Republicans will block it and it will be Dean's fault. Yep. Makes sense to me.
We've all seen the Dean style. If he is elected, we will be a nation at war every second of his term. I don't even want to think about what our country would be like after four years of that.
Those damned Vermonters. They have been at war with themselves for the 12 years Dean was elected and re-elected Governor. Not to mention we are in a real fucking war every second of this president's term for the foreseeable future.
Remember when George Bush used to say he was going to change the tone in Washington? He lied about that. He couldn't even reach out to Jim Jeffords, a moderate in his own party. He was never going to reach out to Democrats. He is too intellectually insecure. He can't handle people who disagree with him, so he retreats into the cocoon of the like-minded.
George Bush is a liar and an intellectual midget who cannot tolerate differences of opinion. He hates moderates like Jeffords. But moderate voters will prefer him to Dean.
Yep. Got it.
I'm opting out of the game of tit for tat. I'm going to get us out of the trenches. If I do nothing else in the Oval Office, I will free people to build new coalitions, explore new ideas and talk to one another for the first time in a decade. This is an evenly divided country. That is the political fact of our time.
Gobbledygook.
The political fact of our time is simple: Republicans want to take Democrats out of the process for ever. Period. Listen to Sean Hannity tell it: `We love Liberals. We just never want them to have power'.
It is about time we had a president who understands that, who has a strategy for governing in such circumstances. Howard Dean and George Bush do not. They just want to pound away and pound away and ram things through. More artillery, more troops, more screaming and more hatred. As for me, I say no more war. I'm for movement. I'm for progress, and if you are, too, come along with me.
So by unilaterally disarming against a guy who is raising 200 fucking MILLION dollars for an election where he is unopposed, we will take our country back by defeating him.
Oh wait, didn't Dean say that it is time to take our country back?
I am confused.