Foot In Mouth To Knee

I used to joke that in Saint Paul, the DFL could plaster a set of those wind-up chattering teeth with a DFL sticker, and it'd win an election. "It may just be a set of wind-up chattering teeth", would say the Volvo-driving, perpetually indignant Highland Parker or the teeth-gritted West End union snuffy, "but at least it's not Republican!" This explains some of the "representation" Saint Paul gets, locally and nationally - the insufferable Jay Benanav on the City Council, most of the School Board, the inaccessible Alice Hausman in the House, and the empty suit Betty McCollum in the US House.

So when George Will writes about Howard Dean...:

Arthur Goldberg was a fine public servant -- secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, ambassador to the United Nations -- but a dreadful candidate for governor of New York in 1970, when it was said that if he gave one more speech he would lose Canada, too. Howard Dean is becoming Goldbergean.

Regarding foreign policy, Dean recently said not only that America is no safer because Saddam Hussein is captured, but that America is "no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center." Well. He says he supported the war to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, although he thinks it made us no safer. And even though he says the war in Iraq made us no safer, he says he would "not have hesitated" to attack Iraq if the U.N. had given us "permission."

Because Dean's foreign policy pronouncements have been curiouser and curiouser, his recent domestic policy speech did not get the attention it deserved for its assertion that America is boiling with "anger and despair." Republicans are, Dean says, trying to "dismantle" the welfare state -- presumably when they are not enriching Medicare's entitlement menu -- and they aim "to end public education."

...I have to ask will "for whom would this be a problem on Dean's part?"

The swing voter? Among swing voters that pay attention to anything, perhaps.

Among the Democrat base? "Sure, he may be wackier than Ralph Nader on butane - hell, he may make Jim Stockdale look lucid by comparison - but at least he's not Bush Republican.

While Howard Dean is looking more and more like the lunatic fringe, so - I'm sorry to say - is the "base" of the Democrat party. Not the whole base - down, Jeff and Flash - but the part of the base that calls the shots.

The Dean candidacy is nationalizing a phenomenon that swept the Minnesota DFL in the past fifteen years or so; while the party (like all political parties) has always been the province of the activist, the activists have gotten more zealous, more fundamentalist - more polarized. The situation parallels that of 1972 - when the pragmatic, Kennedy/Scoop Jackson wing was crowded out by the dogmatic, statist, far left wing of the party. This year, the pramatic - some might say to the point of cynicism - Clinton/MacAuliffe wing is being pushed, maybe pushed aside, by a similar crowd. Maybe the same crowd - the Volvo-driving fiftysomething was probably driving to McGovern rallies in a VW Microbus back then. In recent years the DFL - invested as it is in a party nominating process that rewards relentless activism at the expense of consensus - has been endorsing candidates farther and farther from the mainstream, to the point where the DFL endorsement has been a kiss of death in many elections (vide Roger Moe and Skip Humphrey).

It's a process that gave us Paul Wellstone, at a time when Minnesota was susceptible to electing people like that. Dean is a symptom of the same dynamic - I wouldn't be surprised if he started tooling about the nation in a little green bus one of these days.

But I doubt Paul Wellstone would get elected in Minnesota today - which probably doesn't bode well for Dean or the Democrats, here or nationwide.

Posted by Mitch at December 29, 2003 05:46 AM