...they have your clue.
My response to Nicholas Kristof's amazingly lazy NY Times editorial today (yes, I'm quoting the whole thing. I don't think its content qualifies as "intellectual" property):
Watching presidential politics lately, I've been thinking back to when I was 13 years old and had my heart broken for the first time.
It was 1972, and I was antiwar and infatuated with Senator George McGovern. But as I handed out McGovern leaflets in Yamhill County, Ore., I was greeted as if I were the Antichrist.
NK hasn't been to Oregon lately. It's DeanMania there. They've got Meetups meeting during their Meetups.
Soon afterward, Mr. McGovern was defeated in a landslide.
As Howard Dean will probably be, if the Democrats nominate him.
Quoting a wise Kossack: "Analogies have no predictive value. The message of the Dean campaign is to get off our butts and actually figure out how to get our guy elected. Let others worry about how he might be defeated. That's not our job. "
Or, as another poster said -- and would say to Kristof -- If you don't want Bush re-elected, stop whining: Put your damn shoulder to that wheel and push.
It is, of course, the Democrats' privilege to stand on principle, embrace the man they admire most and leap off a cliff together. Political parties have a hoary tradition of committing principled suicide, as the G.O.P. did with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and, most masochistically, the Democrats did three times with William Jennings Bryan from 1896 to 1908.
Blah blah blah. He's still talking. We're acting. Oh, and someone might want to tell Mr. Kristof that it's 2003 and we have a few more resources these days.
Yet my guess is that the Democratic faithful are being not so much high-minded as muddle-headed. Many Democrats so despise President Bush that they don't appreciate what a strong candidate he will be in November, and they don't grasp how poorly Mr. Dean is likely to fare in battleground states.
I don't think the pundits grasp what's happening outside their bubble. Boots on the ground -- in all 50 states. An enormous number of supporters who have never voted, or at least not recently, making them no-shows on pollsters "likely voters" lists. No other candidate has a quarter of the organization. No candidate besides Kerry has the money. Dean is actively campaigning in at least 25 states while everyone else is focused on, at most, 6.
Mr. Bush beat Mr. Dean, 52 percent to 41 percent, in a recent Pew poll.
One poll out of many, way too early. Kossacks understand this.
Meanwhile, the economy appears to be strengthening in time for the election. Of the 51 economic forecasters surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, all but one expect the economy to grow more rapidly in 2004 than it has in the last 33 months.
Except that jobs are not returning -- and if you're an average voter, jobs *are* the economy.
Against the Bush juggernaut, Mr. Dean faces three disadvantages.
First, geography. The only Democrats who have won the popular presidential vote since John Kennedy took office (when the Southern boom started) have all been Southerners: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Swing states are mostly in the South and Midwest, so the key for both parties is to find a candidate who can seduce "Reagan Democrats," like Ohio steelworkers and Tennessee tobacco farmers. Not another Michael Dukakis.
Excuse me...Nicholas? You might want to review the results of the last election: Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia? Bush. Ohio? Bush. [We won't discuss Florida] And yet Al Gore -- who one Kossack reminded us had all the personality of chalk -- won the popular vote and tied the electoral votes. Virginia is in play. Florida is in play. I think Nevada might be in play. And Oregon is not going to be "too close to call."
Second, style. Angry bluster rouses the party faithful, but it frightens centrists.
Being a centrist myself and knowing many others, I say that centrists are not represented by this Presidency, that many centrists are more angry than they've been since Nixon, and further, that Dean just isn't that scary. That particular meme is entering urban legend territory, in my opinion.
The last two presidents who were fervently hated, Richard Nixon and Mr. Clinton, both won two terms; today's liberal disgust could do the same for Mr. Bush by leading to a nominee like Mr. Dean, who warms the hearts of the party's core but leaves others cold.
NK really needs to get out more. Yes, Dean has energized the base, but that is far from his only constituency. He's the only one of the Dems who has a gun control platform that will neutralize the NRA, he's the only one who can talk about balancing budgets -- and there *are* Independents who care about the deficit and the crazy spending free-for-all of this administration.
Furious liberals already bear some responsibility for the situation because enough of them voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 to sink Al Gore.
Not gonna happen this time.
Moreover, Mr. Dean is smart, but he knows it. America's heartland oozes suspicion of Eastern elitists, and Mr. Dean's cockiness would exacerbate that suspicion. President Clinton oozed charm and was fluent in Southern ("even a blind hog can find an acorn," he'd say scornfully), while Mr. Dean needs a Berlitz course in self-deprecating folksiness.
I'll concede this point. There are lots of "just folks" who are still swayed by Dubya's folksiness. No one with a shot at winning the general is going to get through to them (I think Edwards comes closest to this style).
Mr. Dean's recent remarks about Southern men and Confederate flags showed both his awareness of this problem and his ineptitude in addressing it. He also described the episode as a "huge contretemps," and I seriously doubt that anybody who publicly uses the word "contretemps" can ever be elected president.
This is a marvelous attitude. Granted, I don't believe in voting as "therapy" [Eric Alterman's explanation for Nadar votes] but neither am I going to concede this election to mediocrity. Sheesh.
You get the feeling that if Mr. Dean and Mr. Bush were stuck together in a small Missouri town, Mr. Dean would lecture farmers about Thomas Paine's writings, while Mr. Bush would have the cafe crowd in stitches by doing impersonations of Mr. Dean.
Really, I'm asking -- has NK left his house lately? There was nothing hoity-toity or even particularly erudite about Dean's speech in Dallas this week. Just plain talk. And Dean is very quick to pick up on local political interests and to insert them into his stump speech. Bush won Missouri in 2000, by the way, and Al Gore still managed...you get the idea
The third problem is biography. Mr. Dean may be the one Democrat who is even more blue-blooded than Mr. Bush and who has an even lamer excuse for dodging Vietnam.
Well at least he didn't sign up for it and then go AWOL for a year. In fact, he's frank about the fact that he did not want to go to Vietnam. I double-dog dare Karl Rove try bringing up Vietnam in the general election. This is an issue only in the primaries.
Mr. Dean grew up on Park Avenue in an old aristocratic family, and after getting his medical deferment from the draft, he moved to Aspen to ski. Unlike other politicians, Mr. Dean doesn't even pretend to be particularly religious, and that's a major political weakness in the battleground states.
I'll concede the religious point. Again, I don't think those folks were going to vote for *any* Democrat, though, not after Rove gets through with them.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with Mr. Dean on many issues, and I admire his willingness to oppose our Iraq invasion from the beginning. But shiny-eyed teenagers who distribute leaflets for him in places like Yamhill County are going to get very cold stares -- and end up heartbroken.
Thanks for the advice. I *will* be temporarily despondent if this country actually elects GWB this time. I'll sing a few choruses of "Oh Canada," dive into my doctoral studies with renewed focus, and pray fervently that we survive four more years. But if that happens, it's not going to happen because Dean -- and not some other Dem -- was the nominee.
If the Democrats are serious about governing, they should remember the words of one of their nominees, Adlai Stevenson. After one of his typically brilliant campaign speeches, someone shouted out to Stevenson from the crowd that he had the votes of all thinking Americans.
Stevenson shouted back, saying that wasn't enough: "I need a majority!"
If Democrats are serious about governing, they'll stop rolling over and playing dead -- or being puppets -- for this administration, its ideology and its tactics. Clinton won a second term, but in every other way, the DLC centrist way has been a failure. Tom Daschle "leads" us, Democratic governors get defeated, and Republicans control all the branches of government. That's where being "safe" has gotten us.
Oy. "You can imagine how upset I am to discover these things about Governor Dean. My hands are shaking so hard, I can hardly sign the check."