Truth stranger than fiction, avuncular CNN "senior political analyst" and
American Enterprise Institute Fellow Bill Schneider lauds Howard Dean's ascension to the DNC Chairmanship, awarding Dean the
Political Play of the Week. Wait, it gets better - Bill Schneider "gets it". Well, sort of. No, really - listen to this:
Dean put together liberals, who have not been so totally shut out of power since the 1920s, and local Democratic activists, who feel disempowered by the DNC.
A coalition of the disempowered has powered the Dean comeback -- and helped him win the political Play of the Week.
The Dean takeover is a lot like the takeover of the Republican Party by conservative activists in the 1960s. Conservatives felt disempowered after 30 years in the wilderness.
In the short run, the Goldwater takeover looked like a disaster for the GOP. But in the long run, well, look at what happened.
Analysis after the jump.
No, I'm not suggesting that Bill Schneider may have a non-reactionary bone in his body - that isn't the point. I'm not in fact concerned with the guy at all. What I find interesting here is that while we've been patiently awaiting the inevitable branding efforts of the right wing noise machine and their attempts at recruiting the Great Wurlitzer to hammer the image of Dean the liberal nutjob into millions of American brains, up steps this wellknown and well entrenched conservative talking head with a notion that that I've so far seen circulated only in our very own quadrant of the blogosphere: that the progressive movement that once fueled Dean's presidential campaign and now fueles his "takeover" (interesting metaphor there - ahem) of the DNC is really a mirror image of the conservative movement whose early hero was Barry Goldwater.
I don't want to interpret too much into this. Schneider's simply pointing out that Dean and other progressives have been trying to learn from the organizing and framing skills conservatives have been honing for decades. Still, it's a lot better to have this spin out there than the one of the poor dillusional Democrats who just can't fathom how far out of touch with the mainstream they are. And it's an interesting fact, it seems to me, that this view is getting play, and getting play from this particular direction.