I want to give my perspective on why it's been a struggle for me to get over Dean and warm up to Kerry. I hope this gives some insight to the Kerry supporters who are frustrated with the bad attitude that some of us Deaniacs have towards your guy right now. The good news is it's not as bad as you think.
I'm a Democratic Party warhorse. I'm a member of the Executive Board of the California Democratic Party and a veteran of a couple dozen local campaigns - although never in a highly contested presidential primary. I'm not a professional political operative but I'm no wet-behind-the-ears newbie either.
I thought I was pretty hardened and cynical - especially last January 2003 when I was surveying the crop of candidates for president and was pretty unimpressed. Yes, that includes our presumptive nominee. I would have gone to the mat again for Gore but after he dropped out nobody else really did it for me.
Then I saw the DNC winter meeting on C-SPAN and heard Dean's speech and was pretty much blown away. He said things then that I couldn't have imagined anybody else saying - certainly not any the candidates who had more time enabling the Bush agenda than opposing it. I was there at the California Democratic Party convention last March when Dean blew the roof off the place. I thought that anybody who spoke the truth like that probably didn't have a prayer but deserved my unyeilding devotion.
It turns out both were true.
Dean's message grabbed me on a very emotional level. I always prided myself on avoiding the "true believer" mentality in politics because it makes you do goofy things you end up regretting. Dean changed that for me last year. I know I've got to harden up again and press on with the main fight, but it's hard to let go of the delicious idealism that I allowed myself for what has become a remarkably brief year.
So I'm just trying to best portray what's going on for me and why I have a visceral aversion to Kerry at the moment. It's not really personal, although I do have serious problems with ceratin votes and positions he's taken. I suspect, though, that my reaction isn't terribly uncommon - at least for the Dean folks who were around at the beginning.
Please understand that I'll get over it. Almost all of us will get over it and it will be sooner than you think. Until we do, I'm doing what I can to help Dean partisans develop a framework to keep them involved in political activities that will evenually help the nominee, while respecting their need not to feel like they've sold out. I'm willing to let myself and others hate Kerry for a while as long as we keep doing the work that will end up putting him in office.
Right now what I'm sensing from the Kerry supporters is that's not good enough. There seems to be less of a push for unity and more of a desire to make Deaniacs say "uncle". I see a lot of subtle and some overt pressure to repudiate Dean and make a public display of devotion to Kerry.
Taken to the extreme I see people making the same arguments I was making to my Green Party friends in 2000: if you didn't support Gore you were just helping to elect the evil Bush. The argument is factually correct but didn't convert a single voter and may have hardened them in their stance. I just don't want the Kerry people to go overboard with similar heavy-handed arguments. I'm afraid instead of letting people find their way back home, they'll chase them away for good. That would be a shame.
At our meetup tonight there was absolute unanimity about the need to get Bush out of office. While there was no love shown for Kerry, we all know what we need to do. I think we're all more or less following Dean's lead. While Dean may be "over it" as some say, he hasn't made an endorsement of Kerry and I don't know if he will before the convention. That's okay and it's okay for us to be committed to taking out Bush without needing to be big fans of Kerry at the moment.
All I'm asking is to cut us some slack. I and a lot of my friends are pretty burnt out and a little bitter at how things turned out. The reality is there's little you can say to change that, so consider just laying off a bit and let us do our thing. We're going to get your guy elected whether we like it or not. Be happy with that for a while. It'll all work out.
Peace
