Is that all of the Dean supporters who are railing for him to become head of the DNC first respond to my posts about Deans record as one of the most conservative Democrats the party has seen in the last 60 years, then totally stop responding to the posts because they are probably worried that people who have not followed Deans record as Governor will decide not to back him if they actaully lean about his record.
What is even funnier is that most of the "soundbite" attacks that Dean made against the DLC and the DNC and the candidates who were running aginbst Dean were not invented by Dean but were phrases used against Dean by liberal Democrats when Dean was Governor of Vermont.
If you go back and look at some of the things Dean said about "liberals and progressiveswhen he was governor, you might find it very interesting.
For example:
He once likened a group of liberal Democrats to communists. He publicly said he hoped one fellow Democrat would lose shortly before her election.
Even the issue closest to his heart at times butted with his fiscal priorities. His last budget, in addition to cutting the state share of local schools funding, required higher co-payments from patients, reduced Medicaid payments to providers and cut coverage for dental care, eyeglasses and other services.
The state's budget crunch proved them wrong. Vermont is one of the few states without a constitutional requirement for balanced budgets, and Dean faced a $69-million deficit when he took office. Snelling had imposed a temporary income tax increase that was due to sunset in 1993. Many Democrats expected Dean would extend the tax to help the state weather the recession with more social services spending and continue reducing the deficit.
Dean adamantly refused. Vermont could not compete for businesses if it maintained one of the nation's highest income tax rates, he said. He joined with Republicans to ensure the tax increase disappeared and slightly lowered the rate again in 1996.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/07/06/Worldandnation/Democrat_laces_up_a_l.shtmlDeans behavior here parallels Bushs attempts to get rid of moderate Republicans and replace them with Neo-Cons.
In fact, one quotation attributed to Dean about Clinton and the DLC was actually something that was used by Vermont Liberal Democrats too describe Dean. The Liberal Democrats and Progressives in Vermont referred to Dean as "The Republicna Wing of the Democratic Party" amd Dean later picked this up when his campaign reinvented himself as the person who would change the direction of the Democratic Party with its move to the center, using the phrases that were used to describe his political style as governor to describe the DLC's Centrism. In fact, While Dean was Governor, he was frequently usedas an example of the new Centrist Democrat, while many Democrats insisted that Dean was not even a centrist, but a Conservative Democrat.
Deans closest political advisor pointed this out in 2003.
"The joke among a lot of Vermont Republicans was that they didn't need to run anyone for governor because they basically had one in office already," said Harlan Sylvester, a conservative Democratic stockbroker and longtime adviser to Dean.
(St. Petersburg Times, July 6, 2003)
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/DVNS_Howard-Dean.htmWhen Dean took ofice on the death of Govenror Richard Snelling, all of the legislation and programs for which he later took credit, were already passed and place, and they were resonsible for eliminating the 64 million dollar deficit that Dean has claimed that He eliminated.
As pointed out here:
Most close observers of Vermont politics note, Dean the Democrat continued to pursue much of the agenda established by Snelling the Republican. Dean worked at balancing a deficit-plagued budget, resisting urgings from the left to abandon Snelling's tightfisted ways. As he told Vermont Public Radio in an interview two years ago, "I think there was an expectation among some of those on the farther liberal ends of my own party that I was going to come in and now things were going to be different, and the facts were that we had a big serious financial crisis and somebody had to deal with it and that somebody happened to be me by chance."
In other words, Dean was trying to be true to his pledge to govern as Snelling would have -- as a progressive Republican. The label may be scorned at the national GOP level, but it's still worn proudly in this New England state. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A1216-2003Aug15¬Found=trueAs other Liberal Democrats and Progressives have pointed out, that Dena is poerhaps the last candidate that should be considered if one is looking for change in the Democratic Party. At least progressive change. At heart, everything Dean has ever done has placed him squarely on the conservative side of almost every issue, and as an opponent of the liberal and progressive ideology of the Democratic Party. While Dean likes to describe himself as a Fiscal Conservative, and a Social Liberal, he has always been seen to be willing to sacrifice the social liberalism in order to support his fiscal conservatism. Whenever the time came form Dean to make a chouce between the two, his choice would always come down on the conservative side. Dean never had an original thought about how to accomplish a fiscally responsible method of governing, while supporting socially progressive legislation. When it came time to take sides, Dean would always favor the interests of the wealthy, of large corporations, at the expense of the poor and the middle class. If Dean had the choice to cut programs that provided the poor with necessities beyond their means, or tax the rich, who could afford it, a little more, Dean always refused to tax the rich.
Even his ideas about reversing Bush's tax cuts would have had a more devastating effect on the Poor and middle class, than it would effect the rich.
In an examiniation of Dean's campaign, comparing it to the campaigns of the past, as political historian recently put it, Dean has become a "professional liberal"rather than a genuine one.
This distinction was made by Harry truman in his Diary:
He
belongs to the crowd of Tommy Corcoran, Harold Ickes, Claude Pepper crackpots whose word is worth less than Jimmy Roosevelt's...No professional liberal is intellectually honest. That's a real indictment - - as true as the Ten Commandments..."
http://hnn.us/articles/2999.html
Dean has displays all of the charactereistics of the professional liberal. He changes position frequently (examples, his stance on raising the age or retirement while Governor, and his repudiation of such statements after becoming a candidate. His support of the war in Iraq before Bush went to war, his opposotion to it once a large anti war movement began). Lack of party loyalty is another. Deans threat to take his 1.5 million supporters and look for another politician who was not a Washington insider who would be worthy of his their support is one indication of Dean lack of genuine liberalism.
There have been other Democrats who have done similar things. In 1948, Henry Wallace left the Democratic Party, attacking Truman for not retaining closer ties to the Soviet Union and Stalin after World War II. Deans attack on Democrats who supported getting rid of a similar dictator in Iraq is strikingly similar to Wallaces assaults on Truman for not trusting Stalin. While Most Democrats opposed Bush's timing and reasons of going to war in Iraq. Most Dems saw the need to do something about Hussein, at least once Al Qaeda had been dealt with first. This also parallels George McGovern's use of the Vietnam War to attack not only theRepublican Administration, but the Democratic Party itself. Dean's attempts to swing from supporting unilateral action against Hussein before the war started, to one that was vocally opposed to the war once he saw that there was a vocal oppositionb to the war in a group that did not support either the Democrats or Republicans (the youth vote) Dean rather opportunistically started attacking the very group that a mere year earlier, he was not only allied with, but was one of the foremost members of...The DLC.
Another trait of the 'professional liberal" is a feigned righteous anger whichs is aimed at the political insider. Dean of course, was one of the most inside insiders of the DLC, but he retired from office and gave up DLC membership a year before running, so he could remake himself as an outsider.
As it stands, Dean, is at minimum, a very conservative Democrat, and at most, really a progressive Republican, who had no base at all among existing voters, who had to try to fool a lot of people who had no education, experience, or knowledge of the political system, and used the language of progressiveism, and liberalism in order to snare a group to support him, who would likely never have supported him had they been aware of his political ideology or record before they were snared by his campaign platform. Once ensnared they no longer look at the recor, but bend over backwards to explain the anomoies away, or simply deny them, much as the conservative supporters of George Bush refuse to accept the truth about George Bush's record, his distortions about reasons to go to war in Iraq, and every other lie or deception Bush has been caught in. Dean's supporters support Dean for vague and tenous reasons. Deans fire, and passion are essentially as vague and poor a reason for supporting a candidate as the Supporters of Bush's shared "values" are for supporting Bush.