Reply #19: Alas, Ted Rall is right

[Voltaire99]

A timely and necessary piece. As Alexander Cockburn also recently pointed out (on the brilliant Counterpunch.com), Dean is really a fairly typical establishment man.

Now, the doc's also a reasonable sort who speaks fairly well off the cuff--at least such is my opinion after watching him for an hour on C-SPAN last week. And his reasonableness is, after all, preferable to the Bush Reich, all things being equal.

But pro-corporate reasonableness won't cut it. We're hemorraging jobs like crazy, desperately in need of health care, hated the globe over for our vicious imperialism, and blithely permitting education inequality and income disparity to make a mockery of civil society. To boot, our democracy is severely busted. For these ills the timid center, represented by Dean's corporate tax-cut school of government, offers little hope. Nor is there a bubble for this Clinton clone to ride out eight laissez-faire years upon.

Not that the Democratic leadership seems to notice. The polls are also disturbing about the base--so clearly starved of principled leadership that it can hardly bring itself to dislike Bush. After eight years of Clintonism, today's mainstream Democrats aren't terribly different from mainstream Republicans, except on a couple of key issues (they'll take the corporate state with a helping of reproductive rights, please, and a tiny side order of multicuturalism--but hold the welfare!). It would be interesting to see if they'd accept a candidate like Kucinich, if the news media were to allow him to be seen and heard. That fix, however, is in.

But even if things are bleak, already Nader's invigorating effect upon the moribund party can be read in Dean--his emergence, even if it is as hokey and deceptive as Rall suggests, comes at least partly as a response to the defection from the nest that began in 2000 and continued to show its dissatisfaction with politics as usual in last year's anti-war rallies.

It's just lucky for Dean that the Dr. Strangeloves in Washington make it seem too scary for many right now to think of voting Green. But it's still early in the campaign--plenty of time for Dean to show his true colors and be brought to the DLC's heel, and if that happens, voting Democratic will seem about as necessary this time as it did last.