Just when we were ready to mix up some eggnog and forget about politics for a week or so, Gov. Howard Dean chose to favor the DLC with one of the more peculiar party unity appeals in recent memory. At a campaign appearance in New Hampshire, Dean said this, according to the Los Angeles Times:
"One of the reasons I wish the other guys running for president would tone it down a little bit is that at the end, we're all going to have to pull together in order to beat George Bush. Even the Democratic Leadership Council, which is sort of the Republican part of the Democratic Party -- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party -- we're going to need them too, we really are."
Maybe Gov. Dean should take his own advice and "tone it down a little" himself. He should know how it feels to be on the receiving end of the insulting charge of crypto-Republicanism, since it was hurled at him by self-styled Democratic "progressives" in Vermont throughout much of his tenure as governor. It's a cheap shot not just at us, but at former DLC chairmen like Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman, along with hundreds of hard-working Democratic elected officials around the country who are part of our movement. It also illustrates why we've worried about Dean's loose-lipped approach all along.
Our differences with Gov. Dean's campaign are substantive, not personal. His name-calling yesterday echoes the age-old tactic of some on the Democratic Left who don't want to come to grips with the substance of what New Democrats are telling the party. We think it's critically important that Democrats are credible on national security issues; open and inclusive on cultural issues; imaginative on ways to implement progressive values through new ideas; persuasive to voters who care about real-life results rather than partisan invective; rational as well as energized. Those Democrats who disagree with these views should make counter-arguments instead of adopting the brain-dead tactic of suggesting they are the only "real Democrats."
Going beyond the incoherent rage expressed by some Democrats, we've offered a systematic critique of why Bush's economic and fiscal policies are a disaster for the middle class, and how Bush's foreign policies are undermining America's values and interests in a dangerous world. And we have offered a comprehensive progressive agenda that Democrats should embrace to make the case that they would govern America in a vastly superior manner. We're proud of the advice we've offered over the years, and are especially proud of the policy ideas we helped develop -- from work-based welfare reform, to community policing, to national service, to the most successful national economic strategy since the 1960s -- that in turn helped make the Clinton administration the only recent successful model of progressive politics and governance.
As they did last week when Gov. Dean appeared to dismiss the significance of Saddam Hussein's capture, and then characterized the Clinton administration as an exercise in "damage control," Dean's staffers were quick to do a little damage control of their own. The defamatory reference to the DLC, they explained, was a "joke," a "tongue-in cheek remark" -- a Ho Ho from Ho Ho, so to speak.
If so, it's a joke that's getting pretty old. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has been saying this kind of thing throughout the campaign, along with other howlers like asserting that Bill Clinton wrecked the Democratic Party, and that Democratic centrists were cravenly supporting much of George W. Bush's agenda. Dean and Trippi are very smart men, and they know perfectly well that this rap is a central part of the hard left's hallucinatory revisionist interpretation of the Clinton years as one long act of surrender to conservatism.
In any event, Gov. Dean's recent bout of running-mouth disease is a serious problem for Democrats, and is storing up treasure in heaven for Karl Rove, whose opposition research file on Dean must be bulging like Santa's sack of toys.
We hope that in the New Year, Gov. Dean and other Democratic candidates get refocused on the critical challenge of the 2004 elections: beating George Bush, not competing to see who can offer the most red meat to party activists in early caucus and primary states. Specifically, we'd love nothing more than to see Howard Dean run an idea-based campaign that builds on the progressive legacy of the Clinton years, and that offers a clear positive vision and agenda for the country. And that's no joke.
