So I was cruising through Tom Tomorrow's blog archive trying to find something he wrote so I could show a friend, when I came across the following statement from 11/7/2002:
"Maybe it's time for some good old fashioned class warfare, but that's not something you can adopt like a new set of clothes, as Al Gore made painfully clear in 2000. So who's the fighter, who's the Democrat coming up through the ranks who can energize the party and make it stand for something again? You need someone with the courage of his or her convictions and the charisma and force of personality of a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan (and whether you hated either or both of them, there's no denying that they were both extraordinary at connecting with people, in their own ways). I don't know who that person is, but the Democrats need him or her, and soon."
Sounds like he was talking about Dr. Dean to me. He fits all the criteria.
He's a fighter. He's energized hundreds of thousands of people. He was the first with the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" rhetoric. He clearly had no problem with charisma or force of personality.
Sadly, he is--or became--a polarizing figure like Reagan and Clinton, which just doesn't seem to be what Democrats are clamoring for in their potential nominee this year. The pros and cons of that have been debated to death already, and that's not what I'm looking to start here.
However, I'd like to think one thing everyone can agree on here is how very necessary Howard Dean was. He was the answer to the question every Democrat had been asking themselves since the shellacking of 2002--Who's going to step up and give us a spine transplant?
We should have realized it would be a doctor.