Rich Hailey: Howard Dean May Not Suck
With apologies to Les Jones. Rich notes that Howard Dean, who is viewed by a lot of folks as a bit radical for the Democrat Party, may be an asset for them:
Just think back to 1992 when we really didn’t know much about Newt, who he was, or what he was. He was the Minority Whip, and had a reputation as an extremist, a rabble rouser, and the kind of guy you use to rally your base, but hide in the closet when the campaign goes national so as not to scare off the swing voters.
Sound familiar?
And all this supposedly scary man did was to take core conservative values, frame them in a way that made them acceptible to those very same swing voters, and used those values to create a platform that in 1994 wrested control of the House of Representatives from the Democrats for the first time in 4 decades. He did this in a time when his party had suffered an embarrassing defeat in a presidential election and was fragmenting into a loose coalition of special interests.
March 3rd, 2005 at 11:08 am
The only value that Dean seems to able to articulate is the desire for power and hating Republicans. Then again, those pretty much are the Democrat Party’s core values these days.