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| Howard Dean for DNC Chairman |
| 01.30.05 (7:48 am) [edit] |
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The remaining seven candidates for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee gave a full audition yesterday in New York City. Each pitched his or her qualifications before members of the committee who will be electing the new chair on February 12. In what was to me a quite pleasant surprise, Howard Dean has emerged as the front runner for the position. The choice of the next DNC chairman will be important step for the Democrats, not only because that individual will be one of the most visible faces of the party for the next four years, and not only because he or she will be responsible for rebuilding unity and cohesion. The choice will also be important because it will reflect the Democratic Party’s autopsy of the 2004 elections. The selection will make a clear statement as to what went wrong in 2004, and how the Democrats, in their collective wisdom, think it should be fixed. I am surprised by Dean’s front-runner status, because for some months now, inside-the-Beltway Democrats have made Dean something of a whipping boy for their craven view that in order to win elections, Democrats have to foreswear their principles and run away from northern politicians. Indeed, not long ago, when this very issue came up on CNN’s roundtable show, “The Capital Gang,” liberal panelists Al Hunt and Margaret Carlson both made light of Dean’s interest in the chairmanship, treating Dean as if he were radioactive. It is a sign of Democrats’ returning sanity that they have begun to once again give Dean credit for his considerable political strengths. It is true that Dean lacked both the finesse and the personal charm to secure the Democratic nomination. However, what he did accomplish was remarkable: 1) He was dead right about the war when very few others were; 2) He transformed the terms of the political debate during the Democratic primaries; 3) He gave Democrats a booster shot of pride by reminding them that there were certain bedrock principles that were nonnegotiable; 4) He established the internet as a viable, even essential means of intra-party communication and money raising; 6) He added many voters to the Democratic rolls, and filled Democratic coffers. Beyond these accomplishments, Dean has one overarching asset that he would bring to the DNC chair, one, ironically, that hurt him as a presidential candidate: He relentlessly speaks the truth. I’m sure that everyone has no trouble remembering that Dean earned a reputation during the primaries for sticking his foot in his mouth. The irony of these so-called gaffes by Dean is that they were all important truths that no other candidate had the guts to utter. Take for example Dean’s pronouncement about the Palestinians and Israelis: “…the United States has another important role to play in the region -- that of an honest broker at the negotiating table -- with the trust of both sides and able to facilitate direct talks between the parties. The U.S. must be able to understand the needs of both sides in order to help them find a truly lasting and comprehensive settlement through direct negotiation.” "We do have a special relationship with Israel. We would defend Israel if necessary. I think that is well-known. However, we are also the only country capable of bringing peace to the Middle East, and when we sit at the negotiating table, we do have to have the trust of both sides or we will never succeed." Dean also commented that our policy must be “evenhanded, that "it's not our place to take sides" and that "enormous" numbers of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories would have to be dismantled. Such sensible words, uttered during the steroidal atmosphere of the primaries, created a frenzy, whipped up by both Joe Lieberman and John Kerry. Said Lieberman: "When you start to say, in very loaded terms -- particularly when Israelis are under assault by terrorists, not unlike the situation we find ourselves in -- that America shouldn't take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, that's a break in more than half a century of the American foreign policies carried out by presidents of both parties, and it's very harmful…" Lieberman’s comment (consistent with his recent fawning support of Condoleezza Rice), is on its face fatuous, and is the kind of statement that plays well during a primary season, but falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Lieberman talks as if the tilted policy of the last 50 years in the Middle East has led to great successes. To the contrary it has produced an endless cycle of targeted assassinations, suicide bombings, bulldozed homes, land grabs through expanded settlements, escalating hatred, and tragic loss of life on both sides. Not long after Lieberman’s statement, John Kerry piled on, in the pandering fashion that foretold why he would eventually lose to the weakest sitting president in recent memory. Said Kerry: "…it is wrong that Governor Dean has proposed a radical shift in the U.S. policy toward the Middle East." In the pressurized atmosphere of the primaries, Dean eventually issued a statement, saying that perhaps “evenhanded” was the wrong word to use. The important point here, however, is that Howard Dean was absolutely right in the first place. He tells truths that others don’t dare utter, which is precisely why he was and still is the conscience of the Democratic Party. It was not Dean’s views that undermined his candidacy during the primaries; rather it was his rather tough, gruff, sometimes charmless presentation. However, I am convinced that such personality quirks will not hinder him as chair of the DNC; indeed such toughness may add to his leadership. Dean’s second piece of truth-telling that got him into trouble was his advocacy of campaigning hard for “NASCAR dads,” southern white males who for years have been voting Republican: “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickups trucks…We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats…” While Dean’s clumsy formulation ultimately had the effect of inflaming both southern conservatives and northern liberals, at core he was offering another truth that the Democratic party needs to embrace: There is a significant voting bloc in the south that ought to be captivated by a party that doesn’t believe in corporate welfare and regressive taxation, a party that supports a living wage and universal health care, and is committed to stopping the hemorrhaging of jobs overseas. The problem, according to Dean, is that in order to engage this voting bloc, one has to “show up.” That is, the Democratic Party has to get its hands dirty and fight for these votes, rather than writing them off. The blowback that Dean’s remark elicited from the likes of both Zell Miller and John Edwards, contained a theme that we’ve been hearing since the time of George Wallace and Lester Maddox: “No Yankee has the right to come down here and tell us what we should think!” Oh yeah? If we can presume to tell Fallujah, Beijing, P’yongyang, Caracas, Darfur, and Tehran what they should think, why the hell can’t we tell Oxford, Mississippi about its own problems? The time for pandering to the South, condescending to it, treating the entire region with kid gloves, should be long over. If Howard Dean can bring about that refreshing change, more power to him. However, none of the aforementioned statements mortally wounded Dean’s candidacy during the primaries. Rather, it was a third statement, yet another simple truth, uttered about the Iowa Caucuses, that sunk Dean as a candidate: In the heart of campaign season, two weeks before the Iowa Caucuses, NBC news released videotape of statements that Dean had made four years earlier about the Iowa Caucuses. While speaking to an audience in Canada, Dean referred to the Iowa Caucuses as “dominated by special interests,” which “don’t represent the centrist tendencies of the American people; they represent the extremes.” To underscore his point, Dean continued: "Say I'm a guy who's got to work for a living, and I've got kids…On a Saturday, is it easy for me to go cast a ballot and spend 15 minutes doing it, or do I have to sit in a caucus for eight hours? I can't stand there and listen to everyone else's opinion for eight hours about how to fix the world." What Dean did, once again, was say what no one else was willing to say: The Iowa Caucuses are a disgraceful process that wind up disenfranchising thousands of people who have kids, jobs, and families and can’t possibly attend a caucus for 7 hours on a Saturday in the middle of winter. Obviously, however, Dean’s comments did not sit well with Iowans, and the NBC story marked the beginning of the end of his campaign. But it is the triumph and the irony of Howard Dean that all of his so-called blunders were important verities that the Democratic Party should both listen to and embrace. If Howard Dean is given the platform of chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, we will all benefit from hearing such truths. And after the disappointing, vacillating, Hamlet-like performance of John Kerry, we can only hope that the party has collectively seen the wisdom of picking a chairman who at times may be willful, but who is rarely wobbly. Come February 12, I’ve got my fingers crossed. |
| 1 Comments |
| Condi’s Senate Hearing: Nothing but Rice Pudding |
| 01.20.05 (7:20 am) [edit] |
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Kudos to Senator Barbara Boxer, of California, for her tough, unstinting questioning of Condoleeza Rice during Rice’s confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State. While Rice cried foul, claiming that Boxer was impugning her integrity, in fact, Boxer was simply applying an old-fashioned, conservative idea: You are responsible for your prior acts and statements. This is an idea that doesn’t sit well with the Bush administration. Boxer held Rice’s feet to the fire for being the Iraq War’s biggest apologist and cheerleader—or more accurately, misleader—by simply listing the false statements that Rice had made during the run-up to the war: That there was a collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda; that Iraq had recently purchased aluminum tubes from Africa “that are really only suited for a nuclear weapons program;” that Iraq had purchased yellow-cake, enriched uranium from Niger; that an important rationale for invading Iraq was its use of chemical weapons against the Iranians in the 1980’s—despite the fact that the attacks against Iran were at the time done with U.S. knowledge and complicity. Boxer charged Rice with untruths that were integral to the public’s initial support for the war, a war that has now killed 1300, and severely wounded over 10,000. Partly to explain her passion on this subject, Sen. Boxer offered a statistic of which very few of us were aware: Of those American soldiers killed in While Boxer was Rice’s toughest critic, the most eloquent critic of the Bush/Rice team was Senator Joe Biden who had just returned from one of his many fact-finding trips in Perhaps that is what is so vexing about Condi Rice. Matters of war and peace seem as simple and one-dimensional to her as they do to George W. Bush. While superficially the committee vote looks lopsided at 16-2 (Senators Boxer and Kerry opposed) in favor of Rice’s confirmation, there was enormous dissatisfaction among Senators Biden, Dodd, Feingold, Obama, and Chafee, a number of whom indicated that they had to swallow hard before voting for Rice. Their grudging support was both an attempt at civility, and a tactical maneuver: “We’re supporting you now, so remember that when we decide to kick your behind in the future!” If Rice’s hearing was marked by evasion and denial, the President this week set a new standard for denial in an interview given this week to the Washington Post. The Post asked Bush: “In Responded the President: “Well, we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in The President now implies, with a straight face, that every half-baked, poorly articulated policy idea floated by his administration has been certified, simply because he won the election. According to Bush, not only did the election ratify his prosecution of the war, it also absolves him of holding any administration officials responsible for the failure of the war. If you win the election, everything’s ok, right? All prior misdeeds get sanitized. The arrogance of Bush and the arrogance of Rice are an object lesson in why administrations go off the tracks during second terms in office. The sense of “we’re on top, and we can do what we want,” becomes the guiding ethos of the administration. This hubris will be on full display this week during the inauguration. Take a look at these interesting notes about the cost of the inauguration: 1. Total cost of the Inauguration: 50 million dollars. 2. Total cost of one fully armored Humvee: $125,000. In other words, the cost of the Inauguration could provide the military with 200 new, armored Humvees for the troops. 3. Cost of Laura Bush’s Inaugural Gown by Oscar de la Renta: $10,000. 4. Cost of supplemental body armor for one soldier: $285. One ball gown could give 35 soldiers needed body armor. 5. Cost of Jenna Bush’s beaded gown: $10,000. Cost to update Kevlar Interceptor vests, to protect one soldier from AK-47: $650. Fifteen soldiers could be protected with these funds. Finally, a media note. Of all the proliferating political roundtable shows, my favorite for years has been the Capital Gang on CNN, with such notables as Mark Shields, Al Hunt, Robert Novak, Kate O’Beirne, and Margaret Carlson. The show is long running, has become a signature CNN show, and is illuminating. Hence my shock when I read in various media that the show was slated for cancellation. To confirm what I had read, I called CNN two days ago, and was referred to “public relations.” My interlocutor was not pleased at my question. “We have no comment to make at this time,” she said. She continued suspiciously, “Who are you?” “I’m just a private citizen and a blogger who has enjoyed the show for many years.” She was still suspicious: “Are you from the Washingtonian Magazine?” “No,” I insisted. “I’m just a private citizen trying to get some information.” Her final comment was, “All I can say is that the show will run for the foreseeable future.” Hmmmm. Your guess is as good as mine. |
| 4 Comments |
| Randy Moss: “It’s a Marvelous Night for a Moondance” |
| 01.11.05 (8:10 am) [edit] |
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Happy New Year, readers! I took December off to catch some rays in the Bahamas, generally recharge my batteries, and exorcise the many political woes of 2004. I return in 2005 to find that the new year offers a healthy dose of further disasters: torture, famine, plague, tsunami, pestilence, bribery and general Bush administration corruption. We’ll get to each of those topics in due time, but let’s begin the New Year on a slightly lighter note: When I saw Randy Moss, in the playoff football game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Green Bay Packers, pretend to “moon” the crowd, after his touchdown catch, a feeling of dread came over me. “Oh Lord,” I thought, “We’re in for another paroxysm of moral outrage.” Within seconds, announcer Joe Buck confirmed my worst fears. Buck, normally a thoughtful, levelheaded guy, was in full throat about his indignation: “That is disgusting! I’m ashamed that FOX television showed you that scene.” Buck’s reaction was so over the top that it caused me to do a double-take. Did I miss something? Had Moss pulled his pants down for real, or was it, as I had first thought, a pantomime? It was of course a pantomime, but to judge from Buck’s reaction, you would have thought that Moss had taken a victory lap around the stadium in the nude. It was left to analyst Troy Aikman to lend some perspective to the situation, saying “let’s get back to the football game,” as he went on to discuss the actual touchdown catch. But by this time, the tone had been set, the morality machine had been activated, the bandwagon was rolling. Groupthink had set in. During, the post game show, the focus was not on the fact that Minnesota had gone into Green Bay and had administered a sound thrashing to the opposition; rather, it was on the depravity of Randy Moss. In America, there is never any cost to waxing indignant about some trivial departure from etiquette. So the panel on the post-game show chose to indulge themselves to the hilt. James Brown, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, and Jimmy Johnson took a brief timeout from their usual juvenile banter to serve as arbiters of taste and decency. The tone was funereal, anchorman James Brown’s voice that of a preacher, as he intoned over and over, “Talent can only excuse so much.” This sort of faux morality play has occurred with such numbing regularity in America, that there is a sort of scripted predictability to it. The day after the “scandalous” event, we pick up our newspapers to read the obligatory quote from the man on the street: “What do I tell my 9 year old son when something like that happens!?” Huh? Your nine year old son is far more tuned in to the phenomenon of “mooning” than you are! Virtually every adolescent and pre-adolescent film has copious references to “butts,” “asses” and a clichéd mooning scene for good measure. What Randy Moss did was quite in keeping with the etiquette of the playground—except for the fact that Moss really didn’t do anything. He feigned it! Further, since Moss’ display, many commentators—apparently far more sociologically hip than I-- have pointed out that in Green Bay, there is a longstanding tradition of the crowd “mooning” the opposing team. In other words, Moss’ display actually was a bit wittier than first thought; it was a kind of “right back atcha” to the end zone crowd. Another predictable element to the faux-morality play, is that reactions to the event fall into two groups, the “red state” group, and the “blue state” group. The red state traditionalists see such behavior as another ineluctable step toward moral oblivion. Blue state analysts instead see these episodes as grotesque exercises in hypocrisy, noting that those doing the moral scolding invariably live in glass houses. As one of the best of the blue state writers, Michael Wilbon, of the Washington Post, put it: “Tell me, exactly, how a man completely clothed and pantomiming a mooning is more offensive than erectile dysfunction ads coming into your living room about 10 times a game during NFL telecasts?” Wilbon continues: “A very smart man I know who deals with sports sponsorships for a living told me after the NFL lost its mind over the Terrell Owens/"Desperate Housewives" "Monday Night Football" opening, "It was a lot easier to explain to my 7-year-old daughter why [Nicollette Sheridan] dropped her towel and jumped into T.O.'s arms than it was to try to explain what an erection is during a football game -- not to mention why it lasts four hours." And here is Wilbon’s final salvo: “…this ‘oh-my-gosh-cover-the-c hildren's-eyes’ level of outrage is wearing me out, especially when it comes from a sports league. Where would Enzyte, Cialis, Viagra and Levitra (the Official Erectile Aid of the NFL) be without sports leagues? On NFL.com there is a "Levitra Play of the Year" which I presume has something to do with football -- but maybe not.” While I generally agree with Wilbon’s skewering of the NFL and of FOX-TV, which apparently thinks it’s in good taste to make a game show out of a woman searching for her biological father, or a midget looking for love, I disagree with one of his views: While I find the current flood of male sexual enhancement ads to be annoying, I find lots of ads to be annoying, whether they involve referees stealing beer, or basketball players beating up animated Japanese monsters on a playground. They’re all equally aversive to me, and yet, by the same token, they all have an equal right to the airwaves. Let’s remind ourselves of how quaint we now find it that June and Ward Cleaver could only be shown in separate beds in 1960; let’s remember the advertiser uproar and subsequent withdrawal after Petula Clark gave Harry Belafonte a peck on the cheek during a prime-time duet in 1968; moreover, people were aghast when Cathy Rigby started doing ads for StayFree Maxi-Pads in 1982. Each of these cultural landmarks have one thing in common: Nobody gives a damn about them now. In fact, they have a second thing in common: the contemporaneous uproar notwithstanding, they were all healthy for the society. None of this of course is to excuse Randy Moss’ bad taste; but that’s all it was, bad taste. Not a cultural low point. Just as we survived Ward and June Cleaver bedding down, we will survive Randy Moss, and the reported joys of taking Levitra. |
| 3 Comments |
I'm a psychologist in Washington, DC, and have a progressive outlook on today's political scene.
jeffrowan111@aol.com Jeff Rowan, Ph.D.