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archived: 12 - 18 Jun, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: June 14, 2005 DEAN DEFINES THE DEMOCRATIC BRAND Today, Howard Dean leads the charge for the Democrats. In firing up his troops, Governor Dean has been uttering some home truths about Republicans, neoconservatives and the Republican Party. He has called them predominantly white, middle class and outrageously self-righteous. More. He used a metaphor to lampoon Tom Delay at a Democratic Party function when he said that the embattled Majority Leader should go back to Texas to serve his prison sentence. Democrats from Joe Biden and Bill Richardson to Barney Franks and Harry Reid have begun to shriek at Governor Dean. You might well ask, “Why?” or even “What on earth for? Isn’t it Governor Dean’s job to lambaste Republicans?” Today, it is achingly apparent that sober fact has not yet been absorbed by many members and elected officials of the Democratic Party. What is actually taking place is that Governor Dean is interrogating the Democratic Party. He is doing this in the course of therapy designed to cure its chronic electoral impotence. That said, some of Dean’s patients are cringing in fear of the medicine that he has prescribed. Governor Dean is saying that in order to defeat Republicans at the polls, Democrats must actually believe themselves to be more qualified to hold public office. This is something so fundamental that you would expect that there would be very few Democrats who would find that task loathsome. Actually, I have never met a Republican who was qualified to hold any public office. Recently, I attended a lecture in Oxford by The Hon. Kurt Weldon, a Republican member of Congress from Pennsylvania. Congressman Weldon bewailed and bemoaned the painful realities of 9/11. With tears in his watery eyes and a huge gust of wind in his voluminous lungs, Congressman Weldon described his maudlin memories of that fateful date. Compelled by his commitment to the American people, Congressman Weldon has travelled the globe hopping from continent to continent to visit Moscow, Iran, Iraq and the Middle East searching for evidence that will strengthen America’s intelligence communities. Of course, it went without saying that Congressman Weldon believes that Bush era policy is shaped by intelligence. That is one reason that he has never seen a line item in the intelligence budget that he did not like. He wants to hurl out all of the old, crude and useless hardware bristling and glistening in our top secret intelligence installations and to replace it all with brand, sparkling new machinery, hardware and software manipulated by freshly minted graduates from places like West Point, the Air Force Academy and Annapolis who can help drive us to new heights in our quest for national security. In Oxford, Kurt Weldon’s voice exhibited a fantastic range of emotions: fear; outrage; disgust; revelation; piety and pitiless levels of overweening pomposity. When his verbal explosions had ended, the floor was opened up, and he was questioned about the viability of his proposition – that intelligence was driving policy in the Bush era. Over drinks, when I raised this point again and observed that the opposite seemed to be the case, i.e. that policy shapes intelligence not vice versa, The Hon. Kurt Weldon virtually exploded. Shouting, “I resent that!” at the top of his lungs, he raged on about how insulting it was to be questioned about a lecture he had already delivered. Sotto voce, I pointed out to him that he was raising his voice. That innocent and tactful observation precipitated a remarkably bright redness to surge into the Congressman’s already florid countenance, a biological signal that his psyche had hit overload. This primeval physiological response apparently triggered a lightning succession of other emotional reactions. Kurt Weldon managed to raise the volume of his voice from boom to bellow. He repeatedly exclaimed with astonishing intensity his outrage and his personal resentment at the gaping holes I had punched in his argument. The voices of those academics surrounding us stopped as every eardrum in the room had been tuned into Kurt Weldon’s basso profundo that was obviously his routine shtick in the hallowed halls of Congress. At that point, I took pity on the poor, overly excitable man. He did not realize that in Oxford – and elsewhere in academia and other polite circles – to lose one’s temper is to lose the argument. Eventually, he did calm down, and he admitted to me that domestic travel in America, today, resembles a nightmare of triviality and superabundant tedium. “They make you nearly strip for them,” the Congressman explained about the uniformed security guards populating our regional airports. After I told him that I was a Democratic political consultant, he beseeched me to write to him. The point of this parable is that to criticize a partisan politician for being partisan is not really done by members of his own party, but it certainly fair game for those of opposing political viewpoints. If that is the rule of the game, and it most definitely is, then why is Governor Dean suffering the ignominy of criticisms from Biden, Lieberman, Bayh and Reid who told a packed press conference that Dean had “misspoke.” The answer is that Howard Dean is in the process of redefining the Democratic Party. This process is imperative for the Chairman of the DNC as well as for every member of the Party, from its elected officials to its rank and file who inhabit the grass roots. It is his duty and ours to reinvent the Party. We need a deeper and more powerful understanding of the Democratic Party. We need to define our identity as a political party in opposition to a tyrant and the shameful political movement that is neoconservativism. Until we understand the Democratic Party brand, we cannot shape policy, design new strategies or create new visions of the future for American democracy. To do this, we must have a crystal clear image of our brand, the Democratic Party, so we will have the power to implement positive changes. When we are united in mind, we shall be ready to launch our campaign to preserve our constitutional democracy through the Democratic Party. To achieve that vision, we must engage with the people. We must energize, motivate and inspire them while encompassing our agenda to protect and defend the constitution from the ravages of neoconservative bellowing, blustering and booming Republican Congressmen who offer us nothing except the hollowness of their deluded illusions and the shallowness of their intellects. Dean is bang on message, and it is high time that every true Democrat get with the program – beating the Republicans so badly that they will enter a long night of the soul to search for the true meaning of their party – and it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with neoconservativism. A few days ago, I signed the petition supporting Howard Dean (linked below). It felt good. Real good. RESOURCES
We Love Howard Dean
Dean Was Right
Dean isn't the problem
Howard Dean Speaks For Me __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC, European Business News, NPR and many European television broadcasts examining American politics and culture. In addition to his column for The Political Junkies, he is a regular contributor to the Moving Planet weblog. See: www.planetarymovement.org and http://planetmove.blogspot.com/
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
