Reply #8: Concerning Howard Dean

[oppositionmember]

It's about time we stopped kicking ourselves, and the
Democratic Party, and the Democratic National Committee, and
the Democratic Leadership Council, and...OK, let's leave it
there.

Our problem, if you wish to consider it one, is that we have
principles. People with principles - read ethics, read morals,
heck just read intelligence, consciousness, karma, all that
good stuff - can be taken advantage of more easily than people
without principles.

Many, many Republicans these days have absolutely no
principles. Politics is war. Take no prisoners - or if you do
be sure to parade them through the streets and humiliate and
degrade them.

But getting back to the karma thing - in American speech, what
goes around comes around. True, in the meantime, many bad
things happen to many good people. But payback will take
place. Even George W. Bush will get his comeuppance - who
knows how, but he's already condemned to being written down as
the worst president in American history bar none. Most
reasonable people already consider him as such.

So we have principles. John Dean has principles bigtime, John
Kerry somewhat less. Bill Clinton has them but loses them from
time to time. No one is perfect. But what separates Democrats
from Republicans (at least the George Bush, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz variety) is that Democrats
care about principles and keep trying to do better, to take
better care, to preserve the commonweal.

Ah yes, the commonweal. The good of all. All for one and one
for all. What is most ironic about the current debate is that
this ideal was held strongly by two great men, one a
Republican, one a Democrat - and they happened to be cousins.

Theodore Roosevelt, child of privilege, became the driving
force of the Progressive Age, waging war against patronage,
corruption, child labor, industrial and financial combines,
and senseless or greedy desecration of the environment. His
younger cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt - well, he took a
country that was in despair and gave it hope, examined its
social structures and reformed them, and led the nation - and,
with Winston Churchill, the world - through the greatest test
and darkest nightmare it has known.

So the question arises: why are today's Republicans not only
rejecting the legacy of FDR, but the legacy of TR? The answer
is that both were regarded as traitors to their class, though
FDR to a much greater extent than TR. However, if we look
around us we have abundant evidence of their wisdom.
Yellowstone National Park. Social Security. Just for example.

So where does that leave us? Not to give up hope - not to give
up. It's true that the industrial and media and financial
combines of today are more powerful than anything American
society has ever known, that the political class of today is
more venal even than the backslapping, cigar-smoking,
whiskey-swilling politicians of the Gilded Age - and more
dangerous.

But we should take inspiration from our history - the history
of enlightened policitians, Democratic and Republican - and
fight the good fight. Be in opposition - it's no disgrace to
be the minority party; it's only a disgrace to be the minority
party and surrender your principles. So raise the figurative
barricades - or actual, if necessary - and resist, oppose,
speak out, hold up the flag of principle.

The Democratic party simply needs to remember that it
represents the downtrodden, the old, the poorly paid, the
aspiring, the struggling families, the visionary
entrepreneurs, the social reformers, the enlightened and
successful, and above all the humanists in American society.

Having followed this argument thus far there is only one
conclusion to reach: the Democratic Party does not need a
cheese-paring pragmatical compromiser at this point in
history. It needs a standard bearer, an orator, someone who is
mad as hell and is not going to take it any more.

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is the only person
of that description who comes to mind. Perhaps he is not of
presidential timber - but only because he is too sincere. In
these times one cannot reveal oneself too much or the knives
immediately come out. But he has the stuff of a visionary, and
that is what the Democratic party needs - a visionary and a
humanist with fire in his (or her) belly.

So let it be Howard Dean. And let's get over it and kick their
butts you knuckleheads!