Reply #40: TIME's cover strory article....

[Selwynn]

...on Dean is very interesting. Especially it's write on him personally, which basically claims that he is far less liberal than he is making himself out to be. I don't agree with his position on gun rights, I don't agree with his position on gay-marriage (because it anything less than a full throated defensive of the rights of gay and lesbians is obscene to me, and Dean supports a "separate but equal" approach to the marriage question), I don't support the way he balances the budget (while Governor his approach to budget balancing was the conservative approach of cutting spending and not rasing taxes - he called it bein frugal, but what it really did was cut all kinds of programs for the poor, according to TIME) -- so what's left? What exactly makes him a real Democrat?

Right now my feeling is that he is a big poser, riding the backlash wave against Bush and trying to appeal to the largely untapped resource of the left-wing youthful vote by basically lying about who he really is. Who he really is is an extremely moderate democrat, not really all that far to the left of Leibermann.

It's sad when the difference between Lieb and Dean is seen as the different between "center" and "left." It is actually the difference between "RIGHT" and "CENTER." We haven't seen Left yet, and that's part of the reason why the country is in such horrendous shape and has been on that declining path for 30 years.