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Monday, February 07, 2005

Can I take the "Dean for America" signs out of the trunk of the car again now?
Posted by Jill | 4:27 PM
Good Lord, the People have actually won something.

Americablog reports that the ornery and crabby Tim Roemer, the Last Man Standing in front of Howard Dean's quixotic quest to head up the DNC, has dropped out -- but not without laying a nice fat turd in the pool:

"I got into this race five weeks ago to talk about the devastating loss we experienced in November," Roemer said in an interview. "It was not about 60,000 votes in Ohio. It was about losing 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the country. If that's a trend in business or politics you're in trouble."

Republicans are in the strongest position they've been in since the early 20th century, Roemer said.

Roemer, who said top Democrats in Congress encouraged him to enter the chairman's race, said he wants to strengthen Democrats' position on national security.

"If there's one reason Senator Kerry lost the presidential race, it was because he failed to make the American people feel safer," Roemer said, adding that he also wanted to encourage talk within the party about developing a stronger position on values.

Roemer said he hoped to make the party more inclusive, especially on the issue of abortion. He opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest and the health of the mother.


Roemer is off-base on national security. Aside from the kind of knee-jerk wingnuts who weren't going to vote for him anyway, Karry's national security failure was twofold:

1) failing to articulate how damaging Bush's Iraq war is to the war on terror, rather than being part of it;

2) failing to articulate how he would have handled things differently.

There was a strong element of "Don't change horsemen in the middle of the Apocalypse" to the way people voted on national security. They might not have thought Bush was doing a great job, but Kerry was alternately a cipher (in which case why not stick with what you've got?) or mostly the same (in which case why not stick with what you've got?).

Kerry relied too heavily on his war service, something I predicted would be meaningless way back when everyone in my family was saying that Kerry was a better choice than Dean because he'd served.

I agree with Roemer that Democrats have to start talking about values, but they can't be the kind of values that the Christian Right talks about. Gay rights aren't about "morals", they're about who in this country is going to be treated as a citizen equal to everyone else, and the only correct answer is "Everyone" -- gay or straight. Abortion isn't about morals either, it's about who decides what happens to a woman's body, and whether there is a time when a woman ceases to be a self-determining individual and becomes simply a vessel for delivery of a fetus. We say there isn't. They say it's every day of her fertile life.

That said, I believe Hillary Clinton is 100% dead on right in the way she's handling the abortion issue, and this is the ONLY concession that Democrats should make on reproductive self-determination. Abortion is a last resort where everything else fails. This means you focus on education and the availability of contraception to REDUCE the number of abortions. Force anyone who doesn't agree with that to admit that women aren't human beings, and that their issue isn't human life, it's punishing unchaste women. Most Americans won't go along with those ideas.

Democrats haven't articulated an idea that Americans in a hurry can understand. John Kerry and Al Gore can stand and give position papers till the cows come home, but you've got exactly 15 seconds to get an idea across, and if you can't do it within that timeframe, then go the fuck home.

Republicans have achieved success by sound bite: Compassionate conservatism. Culture of life. It's your money. Ownership society. The war on terror. Sure it's all meaningless horseshit, but it's quick, punchy sound bites that people can think they understand while the government that's articulated them stabs them in the back while they're driving the kids to soccer practice.

If WE can articulate ideas in this kind of sound bites, we're halfway towards taking back the country. Americans LIKE public schools. They LIKE having roads. They WANT Social Security. They WANT a safety net for emergencies. We've allowed Republicans to define the terminology now since 1980, and enough is enough.

My excitement about Dean playing such an important role in the reformation of my party is tempered by cynicism. Both Republicans and the kind of whore Democrats who have been content to catch the scraps tossed at them by the same corporations who lavish spoils on Republicans are scared shitless of this guy, and they'll do anything they can to destroy him -- and the party in the process. It's up to us...the people....to make sure they don't succeed.
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