I’ve written about the AstroTurfing activities of the ObamaNation and the TEA Partiers so often that I’ve started having nightmares about angry blindfolded protesters dressed as Native Americans dumping cases of Snapple on the floor of the Houston Astrodome for no other apparent reason than it’s fun to do on television. And, while the evidence of well-funded propagandists on both sides ginning up the outrage of ordinary citizens for sinister corporo-political purposes is overwhelming, for some reason, nobody wants to cop to the truth that their side is doing it, too.
Those all-too-willing to jump on the Evil AstroTurfing Obot Train to Townhalls, will routinely recoil in horror and indignantly swear up and down that they would never, ever, ever, Heaven and all things Holy forbid, AstroTurf anything themselves, if any but the demonstrably institutionalized were to actually have the temerity to even suggest such a thing. “Oh no,” they cry, “nobody’s paying or manipulating me! I’m really well and truly pissed!” Yet, according to these same people, the only reason Barack Whosayin’ Yomama is Pretendident now is because Soros-backed David Axelrove channeled Jim Jones and turned a large portion of America into a KoolAid addicted, liberal/progressive/socialist Jonestown, solely due to the machinations of paid Nutroots bloggers and their commenters, ACORN, MoveOn and anybody with a union card. And, their private corporate pseudo news organization, MSNBO. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll be the first to admit that I did not come into this blogging business as the most politically astute or learned person on the planet. The idea that I might be is so far from the possibility of reality that the words I just typed hardly belong in the same sentence. I know that. However, watching my hopes for the election of a candidate I thought to be most qualified to “inherit” (I’m beginning to hate that word) the responsibility of guiding the county back on track be bashed, dashed, crashed and gleefully shattered to smithereens by disparate entities on the left and right, seemingly demented in their zeal, has given me an opportunity to learn and grow politically in a way unlikely to have been appreciated before, had it presented itself. And frankly, I’m sick of it.
All. Of. It.
Each news story, op-ed column, Google search, blog post and talking head garbage spew disguised as informed opinion has added another tidbit of information, often counter to the point the happy yakker thought he/she was making, to the tapestry of my understanding of our nation’s political reality. It’s enough to make you puke. Read the rest of this entry »
Can you say, FISA? How soon the blogger bullies of the “progressive left” forget that they are, in the eyes of real politicians, completely expendable. While they like to pretend they, and they alone, are responsible for every Democratic victory since Ned Lamont, the truth is, not. Unlike PUMAs, they keep being surprized at the realization that Democratic “party unity” is the same sort of public relations sales pitch tool as “hope and change,” and that nobody really in charge actually expects anybody to buy that crap, let alone to be held to it as a principle. Maybe now that Joe Lieberman will be allowed to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, as president-elect Barack Obama hoped, (Lieberman was his mentor) they will finally get the message that they simply exist to suck up as they’re told.
Howard Dean gets it. Nobody invested as much of himself and his reputation into getting Barack Obama elected as Dean did, putting his position as chairman of the DeaNC, his Democracy for America, and his 50 state strategy at Camp O’s complete disposal. DFA lobbied hard against FISA, at one point even asking Senator Obama directly to vote against it on their website. Of course, I can’t find that page now, but I remember it well. At any rate, it seems Dean has learned his “Obama is a fair-weather friend” lesson well. From the Huffington Post:
“My point of view is that Barack won,” Dean said. “He can afford to be magnanimous. And if we happen to win both recounts and Georgia, Joe is the 60th vote. And the truth is — and I certainly don’t have to defend Joe Lieberman because, you know, we have an interesting history — but the fact is, he does vote 90 percent of the time with the Democrats. And no, he shouldn’t have said all those things. But why not clean the slate? Why not start all over again? Why not allow him to vote with us on the 90 percent of the stuff? He will be a good vote on climate change — and this matters. He may be a good vote on election reform, which I hope we will get to. So, you know, he may end up – though it is a little against the odds — he may end up being the vote that allows us to conduct business when Mitch McConnell decides we shouldn’t.”
Greg Sargent over on TPM sounds a bit snippy in his description of a conversation he had with Dean:
Howard Dean says that he’s “fine” with the Senate’s decision not to kick Joe Lieberman off the Homeland Security committee and suggested that the Senate had acted in accordance with what Barack Obama wanted.
In a phone interview with me just after the vote concluded, I asked Dean if he thought the Senate should keep Lieberman. He said that the Senate had acted “in the spirit of unification, which is what the President-elect wanted.”
“He called the shots, and that’s fine,” Dean said, in an apparent reference to the tone Obama has tried to set in Washington as he prepares to take power.
Dean also said he understood the natural human desire for “revenge,” a description that will dismay many of Dean’s allies in the liberal blogosphere, who maintain (as do I) that this wasn’t solely about retribution.
Greg and all the other pissed off bloggers don’t understand the lesson Dean has learned so well; Barack Obama doesn’t give a spit what you think, want, or care about. Not only that, Dean knows that as far as Obama’s concerned, anybody who thinks they might be uniquely useful might as well be Kleenex tissue or toilet paper; use it once and throw it away. As Hillary Clinton also learned, you either hop aboard the Obama Express and hold on for dear life, or you stand on the platform and watch the train pass you by. Your choice. But then, TPM knew that, too. Or, should have.
We are a nation of schizophrenics. Not in the clinical sense; in the popular culture definition sense of happily holding dear diametrically opposed views at the same time. We are tolerant bigots who elect a black man president while the majority of black voters vote down a gay rights measure. We support equal rights for all, except when it’s inconvenient. All men are created equally superior to women. We champion religious freedom for those who believe as we do. Those who don’t, have no place at our table. That’s just who we, as a nation, are. Deal with it.
At the forum shown in the following video clip, whenever and wherever it was, a panel of men discuss sexism against women in this year’s presidential election. Seriously. One of them, outgoing DeaNC chairman Howard Dean, makes clear the case that racism trumped sexism in the Democratic primaries, unfairly marginilizing Hillary Clinton, and trvializing the concerns of women who supported her as fervently as black Americans embraced the historic nature of Barack Obama’s candidacy and ultimate election. Not that Dean admits personal culpability, no siree, Bob. Everybody hated his neutrality, according to him. Somehow, the fact that he has been actively involved with Barack Obama since his Democracy for America (formerly Dean for America) tapped him as one of Dean’s Dozen in 2004, and whose 50 state strategy, DFA grassroots mobilization, and internet fundraising model was used to help him get elected to the Senate and the presidency, just didn’t happen to come up.
Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama.” Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.
Incidents around the country referring to President-electBarack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.
From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.
Yet, who can forget the Asheville, North Carolina grade school teacher, Diantha Harris, intimidating children for supporting John McCain?
Then there’s the Sarah Palin thing. Just like nobody but Hillary supporters cared about “Bro’s Before Ho’s” t-shirts, “Sarah Palin is a cunt” t-shirts were perfectly fine with most Democrats, it seems. And it’s okey-dokey to hang Palin in effigy, doing so might raise the ire of some neighbors and other rabid feminists, and eventually garner attention from the authorities, but hang Obama the same way and expect to get arrested, pronto. Everybody knows hanging a black man is worse than hanging a white woman. Sheesh, even the L.A.County Sheriff’s Department spokesman said so:
Whitmore said that potential hate crimes are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If the same display had been made of a Barack Obama-like doll, for example, authorities would have to evaluate it independently, Whitmore said.
“That adds a whole other social, historical hate aspect to the display, and that is embedded in the consciousness of the country,” he said, adding he’s not sure whether it would be a hate crime. “It would be ill-advised of anybody to speculate on that.”
Yep, we like our prejucices, and do not believe for a minute that whichever one we like the most is nearly as bad as the one you prefer. Let’s face it, the only use we have for “honest” discussions about various forms of “feel good about yourself by putting down others” hate, is when it comes to assigning blame for our problems to somebody else.
First of all, like I said in an earlier post, buck up, guys, it’s not the end of the world! And, contrary to what anybody says, PUMA is a HUGE success. Or, it can be. Sure, the naysayers in the mainstream media, the blogger bullies, and the disappointed Republicans who didn’t know we were alive until they got desperate and now want to blame us, are minimizing us, our numbers and our impact. What makes it easy to discount us and our numbers is the same thing that makes us unique and powerful; PUMA is a true grassroots movement. Unlike those well-organized “Astroturfing Tools of Axelrod”, we have no corporate funds to buy ad time, and pr firms to bump up our “presence” in the media, no political sponsorship giving us decades old, well researched membership lists to exploit, just like-minded people, united in principle, dedicated to effecting change. That’s power, baby, and it blows that “GOP sponsored, ratfucking operation” nonsense straight to hell. We’ve got what Howard Dean exploited and turned into Democracy for America, even though he did have his Dean for America base to build on. But we’ve got a PUMA base to build on, now, too. If we want to. If not, hey, it was a helluva ride, and before we do anything rash, it might be prudent to sit back and wait to see how this thing shakes out. I’ve got a feeling we might be desperately needed in the very near future.
A lot of us have the blues right now, that’s to be expected. But the truth is, there’s so much to be admired about all of you who call yourself PUMA, and those of you who sympathize with what PUMA stands for, that it’s hard to know where to start. You guys forced the DeaNC to at least pretend to live up to it’s principles. With no money, no headquarters, no nothing, really, but integrity, spirit, devotion and hard work, you took a contingent of real Americans to the freaking Democratic National Convention and were heard! Ignored, but heard. All things considered, that’s pretty amazing for a loose-knit coalition of people scattered across the country, connected only by the internet and faith. There isn’t really even one central PUMA…anything, other than the absolutely unshakable belief that democracy should be central to the Democratic party, and the willingness to play David to the DeaNC’s Goliath, if need be.
Just because it’s the right thing to do.
I am so grateful to all of you, you are what America should be. So, have a long hot soak and a glass of wine, watch a DVD, get some rest, and chill. This movie just started.
This is the first record I could find of contact between the man who is soon to be the most powerful man in America and Barack Obama. Yep, if Obama is elected, Howard Dean will become kingmaker, and as usual, he will have bungled his way to “the top.”
When I went looking into the connections between Howard Dean and Barack Obama, I fully expected to find evidence of Dean’s vengegence-fueled, behind-the-scenes machinations driving Barack Obama’s 50-state bus to the White house, with the aid of compliant Netroots mechanics, and I did. What I didn’t expect to find was the degree of Dagwood Bumstead-style, hapless bungling involved.
Don’t get me wrong; I always knew that neither Dean or Obama really had any reason to believe their convergent, novel approaches would work, or that either of them would really have a clue how to govern if their efforts were rewarded. In fact, in two previous “Runnin’ On Theory” and “Runnin’ On Theory: The Beauty Shop Campaign,”posts, I said so. However, it wasn’t until recently, after days of internet surfing, searching and Googling, that I found out just how clueless both men are. Especially Howard Dean.
The story of Dean’s unsuccessful presidential bid, as well as his innovative fundraising and grassroots campaigning, has been chronicled to death. So has his now famous feud with the more “centrist” factions of the Democratic party. What’s not been so well chronicled is the fact that Dean calls himself a “centrist,” and he lucked into the internet innovation that propelled him to the forefront of a contest he never expected to win. And while Dean may appear to have hand-picked Obama to be the vehicle of his revenge, it’s just as true, if not moreso, that Obama’s camp used Dean’s blind spot to hijack the party.
Dean’s Dean For America campaign organization which later morphed into Democracy For America, a grassroots coalition which tapped Barack Obama as one of Dean’s Dozen almost as soon as it transitioned after he dropped out of the presidential race in 2004, embraced the internet early. From a website called Lessig, July 14, 2003:
Hello from the Dean for America campaign. Governor Howard Dean will be posting later today, here and at the official campaign blog, Blog for America. It’s our policy that whenever Governor Dean posts anywhere on the Internet, his posts will also be crossposted to our site.
Lawrence Lessig is still involved in internet politics, recently spearheading a “bi-partisan” letter-writing campaign urging debate format reform, as well as an earlier, similar “bi-partisan” effort requesting that the DeaNC make debate footage free. Barack Obama also wrote a separate letter of his own. The cast of internet characters in both instances overlaps quite a bit.
Though Dean has been quoted as advocating for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party,” decrying what he perceived to be the rightward shift in ideology, in this interview with Mother Jones, October, 2004, Dean, promoting his just completed book, “You Have The Power: How To Take Back Our Country And Restore Democracy In America,” said this:
MJ.com: In the book, you say your positions haven’t changed much from when you were a delegate for Jimmy Carter, but that the party has shifted to the right around you.
HD: It’s true. And the remarkable shift didn’t really occur to me until after I ran for president, because in Vermont I was very much a centrist. I mean, my positions on gun control are probably a little more conservative than most people in the Democratic Party, although I did support the assault-weapons ban and all that. But my position on the death penalty is disturbing to some of my liberal friends, because I do support it in a few instances. I balanced twelve consecutive budgets. And yet, I was the most liberal guy out there other than the three candidates who really didn’t have a chance at winning! Well, that’s ridiculous. What happened to the spectrum of opinion in the Democratic Party? If I’m the most liberal guy and I’m in the center, that means the entire party is moving to the right — except for those who supported me.
Since that makes no sense to me, it seems that Dean was merely attempting to justify his anger at the “centrists” who mocked him, and in his mind, caused him to lose. If he was indeed, a “centrist” and had won, it’s likely he would have embraced the political shift as natural evolution. Yet, it was those old school “centrists” who weren’t yet sold on his theory with whom he had a beef. In the same article, Dean once again sang the praises of the young Illinois state senator, whom he had earlier endorsed, who was running for the national office he now holds, and for whom Dean was campaigning at that time.
MJ.com: Who else have you supported?
HD: Barack Obama was an early one, because a lot of our people in the Illinois primary were working for him at the same time they were working for me. So we kind of discovered Barack before he was Barack. (laughs)
Since by this point, Dean was stumping for Kerry and the only thing Obama had done of note was speak at the convention, one wonders if Dean was responsible for the Kerry/Obama hook-up.
Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was notable for it’s fundraising and internet usage, though there was no real reason to expect any of them to work. I found an interactive Howard Dean For Iowa game, and a Dean For America fundraising bat. However, by all accounts, it was stumbling upon Meetup.com that made the difference. According to Joe Trippi, Dean’s former campaign manager, it was all an accident.
The Dean movement was another beast entirely. According to the conventional wisdom, it managed to raise both far more money and far more enthusiasm than its rivals because it used the Internet. In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, his bombastic but instructive memoir, Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, stands that formula on its head. “We were not using the Internet,” he writes. “It was using us.”
He has a point. An election professional who entered presidential politics working for Ted Kennedy in 1980, Trippi had also toiled for several tech companies during the Clinton years. With one foot in the political world and the other in cyberspace, he didn’t invent his candidate’s Internet offensive so much as he discovered and magnified it. Every political junkie knows that Trippi and Dean built their movement by embracing Meetup.com, a company that arranges get-togethers for people who share a common interest–anyone from disgruntled Scientologists to fans of Angelina Jolie. What isn’t as widely appreciated is that Dean’s supporters were already using Meetup.com to find each other before the campaign even knew the service existed.
Indeed, when Trippi first saw the site, “the first thing I noticed was that Howard Dean–dead last among the Democratic candidates in almost every other meaningful measurement–was actually leading in this one category, the number of his supporters who wanted to meet up.” He added a link to Meetup.com from the campaign Web site, and with that small piece of HTML code the number of Dean backers in the system suddenly leaped from 432 to 2,700. “For months,” Trippi recalls, “Meetup.com would run its own parallel campaign, the number of people meeting up growing from that initial 432 to more than 190,000. Eventually, we’d even have to create our own, specialized version of Meetup–the GetLocal tools, which would grow to 170,000 people on its own.” When Trippi persuaded Dean to attend a meetup himself during a stop in Manhattan, the number of fans planning to attend started to multiply; he ended up speaking to 500 people in a fully packed hall, with another 300 or 400 waiting outside.
Trippi also has other insights into the Dean phenomenon. In this July 2004 MSNBC piece, Trippi alleges that it was not Dean’s famous scream, nor his centrist enemies that did him in, it was Howard himself. In quotes from his book, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Trippi claims to have known Dean was doomed in Iowa. He also says that Howard Dean knew it, too. One of the many mistakes Dean made, besides barging uninvited into a Martin Luther King celebration, and being thrown out, was to refuse to release his medical records, undermining his claims of a new kind of transparent politics. After debating the point with his staff one night in December of 2003, Dean once again refuses, effectively sealing his ultimate doom, and after retreating to a quit corner to confer with Trippi, makes this confession:
“This. I never thought it would go this far. I was going to raise my profile, raise health care as an issue, shake up the Democratic Party. Help change the country. But I never thought this would happen. Don’t you understand?” He turns and faces me. “I never thought I could actually win. I wanted to . . . but I never really thought it could happen.”
This was not to be the last time Dean underestimated himself and his strategy. In an October, 2006 article, when it looked like Dean’s strategy would lead to unprecedented Democratic election success, Dean seemed shocked:
“I didn’t expect much to come of this strategy for four or even six years,” Dean told TIME.
Neither did anyone else. In June of this year, The Huffington Post ran a story detailing the relationship between Obama’s “nomination” (selection) as Democratic presidential nominee and Dean’s 50 state strategy. Referring to Dean’s uphill climb for acceptance within his own party, HuffPo quoted Paul Begala:
“He says it’s a long-term strategy,” said Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton aide and Democratic strategist. “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”
If Obama is indeed elected president, Dean will finally be fully vindicated. And while he most assuredly had a hand in Obama’s success, it could be argued that Obama is far more significant to him than he is to Obama. Camp O recognized Dean’s techniques as tools to be used to their benefit. Dean sees Obama’s success as vindication. But once vindicated, instead of being venerated, he is most likely to be relegated to obscurity. For Howard bought the shiny new Obama car without bothering to kick the tires. Obama has no intention of sharing the spotlight, in fact, he is not at all the “breath of fresh air” Dean initially presumed him to be. Obama/Axelrod and Co. have a far different, not so innocent agenda for which Dean provided the road map they’ve used to pursue it. And while Obama’s success may vindicate the strategy, the O Team is not likely to allow it to elevate the man.
This time, Dean may have convinced himself he could win, and this time, again, he’ll be wrong.
Next up: Howard, Barack and the Bad Boyz of the Blogosphere
In conjunction with partner, Brave New Pac, which shares office space with Brave New Foundation, an organization that lists Acorn, Code Pink,and DFA among others on their partners page, and Brave New Films, DFA has shown how low they will go to with this, the second of two attack ads so far. The Brave New folks, on the other hand, have loads of attack ads of their own on their webpages. This is the first:
Two liberal political action committees are making an issue of John McCain’s past bouts with skin cancer in a television commercial that features his facial scar and demands that the Republican presidential nominee release his medical records to the public.
The 30-second ad, so far airing for $50,000 only on MSNBC, is paid for by Brave New PAC and Democracy for America, a political group headed by James Dean, the brother of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Hey, Howie, here’s a thought. Why not spend some dough promoting your guy instead of ripping the other guy? But then, there’s not enough time or money in the world to make that work, is there, Howard?
Last night, I put up a post about outside groups doing ads against John McCain on behalf of Barack Obama. To be sure, one of the groups involved in the pro-Obama push, Democracy For America, is not an “outside” group at all. Founded by Howard Dean almost immediately after his famous scream ended his presidential hopes, it is currently chaired by his brother, and also tagged Barack Obama as one of the first of Dean’s Dozen politicians to watch. That’s about as “inside” as you can get.
The American Issues Project was founded to champion the conservative values that have made the United States of America a blessed nation: smaller government, a strong and ready national defense, lower taxes, and a government that encourages entrepreneurship and new job creation in America. We also know how critical it is for America to win the war against the radical Islamic extremists abroad so we do not have to fight them here on American soil.
“Do You Know Enough To Elect Barack Obama?” seems to be the group’s first effort. Not so for the second, more enigmatic entity with a provocative video. This one is not even technically an “ad,” it’s more of a “viral video” posted on You Tube and the creator’s website. “weneedmccain” says this, in his You Tube profile:
Dedicated to promoting the McCain/Palin 08 Campaign and exercising my freedom of speech to speak my mind over matters critical to the future of this nation.
“Dear Mr. Obama: Who Are You?” is his latest video, preceded by “Dear Mr. Obama: Economics 101″ and the first, entitled simply, “Dear Mr. Obama.” Though not much is known about the videos’ producer, a Google search of “weneedmccain” does lead one to some info, however. techPresident.com’s, Micah L. Sifry, whoever he is, appears to have tried to dig up something on whoever “weneedmccain” is, with mixed results.
“Dear Mr. Obama” was posted on YouTube by someone using the handle “weneedmccain.” When I emailed that person asking for information about the making of the video, I got this reply:
“I wish I could currently spend some time with you, but this can’t be about me right now. Too much going on.
I may be doing an interview with the soldier, who he is, what he believes, some Iraq stories and his parents views in the near future.”
More e-mail correspondence gave techPresident the filmmaker’s name: Michael Brown. His piece is worth a read, but does not defeinitively answer the questions, “who is Michael Brown? who does he work for? Is he a Mccain campaign GOP sanctioned operative, or a staunch Republican with video studio access and time on his hands?” techPresident has a follow-up article on the subject, suspiciously dated the same day as his first, which seems to lead Sifry, after a phone conversation with “Michael Brown” to the gut-feeling conclusion that the video is voter-generated.
Whoever produced and distributed these ads, here they are:
Democracy for America is our nation’s largest progressive political action community. With over 725,000 members nationwide, DFA is a grassroots powerhouse working to change our country and the Democratic Party from the bottom-up. We provide campaign training, organizing resources, and media exposure so our members have the power to support progressive issues and candidates up and down the ballot. Join us in the fight to take our country back!
an organization, now chaired by his brother, James, in conjunction with Brave New Pac, has a new Swift Boat-style ad aimed at John McCain. The ad features former Navy Midshipman Philip Butler, who was imprisoned with McCain, claiming that McCain’s “volatile” temper makes him “unfit to lead.” DFA is already planning for a second ad:
Thanks to your support, our ad featuring former POW Dr. Phillip Butler is already making a splash and exposing John McCain as “unfit to lead.”
This is just the beginning of our aggressive, hard-hitting ad campaign to expose the real McCain. It’s time to take it to the next level.
For our next ad, we want to hear your ideas. DFA has always believed in the power of the grassroots over Beltway consultants. We need to continue unmasking the real McCain. The ad should be aggressive, creative and truthful.
Fox News reports that the new “527’s are okey-dokey” attitude of the Obama camp seems to be encouraging other outside groups to jump into the fray:
The Service Employees International Union, a labor group backing Obama, launched its own ad campaign Sunday, announcing a $2 million ad buy in targeted markets in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Iowa.
The ad, titled Family, features a mother talking about the strain of trying to provide for her family in an economy defined by higher costs, lower wages and lost jobs, and draws distinctions between Obama and McCain on their approach to the economy.
Marc Ambinder reported on Camp O’s new thinking in The Atlantic on September 9:
The upshot: Obama’s campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. “I assume with their 527s stirring, some [Democratic] ones will as well,” another senior campaign official said.
Jim Dean is the current Chair of Democracy for America (DFA). As DFA’s key spokesperson and fundraiser, Jim keeps DFA in the national spotlight. Jim brings DFA’s mission across the country to all 50 states. He meets with candidates, organizers, party leaders and activists, inspiring everyone to get involved and take back our country. Jim has been involved with DFA since our founding in 2004. He has a long history of political involvement and was a key fundraiser for his brother, Howard’s campaigns for President, Governor and Lt. Governor.
Governor Howard Dean, Founder
Governor Howard Dean founded Democracy for America in 2004 to build on the grassroots momentum for reform that his bid for the presidency sparked. The movement propelled DFA into a successful national organization committed to the “50 State Strategy.”
In early 2005, DFA ran a people-powered campaign to elect Governor Dean to chair the Democratic National Committee. Democrats nationwide badly wanted reform and found the answer in Dean. In February 2005 Governor Dean resigned from the leadership of DFA to take his new post as chair of the Democratic National Committee.
One of Democracy of America’s first acts was to name Barack Obama one of the newly initiated Dean’s Dozen politicians to watch.
This is the second in a series of posts about the reasons for my disillusionment with the Democratic party and the way this nomination process played out in the words of the people involved. Today, Howard Dean.
Speech to California Democratic party convention, March 15, 2003:
I am Howard Dean and I here to represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
“Not only are we going to New Hampshire …, we’re going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we’re going to California and Texas and New York,” he said. “And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we’re going to Washington, D.C. To take back the White House. YEAHHHH!!!.”
From Democracy For America on Barack Obama being named one of the initial “Dean’s Dozen” on May 12, 2004:
Several months ago I put out a call to the hundreds of thousands of grassroots activists who had worked on my campaign to run for office themselves. Hundreds of volunteers answered this call. Our new organization – Democracy for America – is dedicated to using its resources to support those candidates in their fight to take our country back from the right-wing conservatives who dominate our government. Today, Democracy for America announces the Dean Dozen – twelve diverse candidates that represent the spirit of grassroots democracy.
edit
Barack Obama for United States Senate from Illinois. In the race to regain control of the U.S. Senate, Democrats have few better chances to pick up a seat than in Illinois. DFA volunteers all over Illinois helped Obama win his primary, now it’s time to help him win the general. Stay tuned: I will be on the trail with Barack soon. www.obamaforillinois.com
The Internet is the most empowering and democratizing invention since the printing press.”
The Washington Blade reports on March 28, 2008 that in a deposition regarding the case of Donald Hitchcock, a gay man fired from the DNC for poor job performance, Dean blames Donna Brazile for deteriorating relationships with the LGBT community:
Dean said some “influential individuals” within the DNC Black Caucus, such as Donna Brazile, opposed the plan because it was seen as “an affront to the civil rights movement.”
edit
“I wanted equal representation for gay and lesbian Americans,” he said, “and I wanted to achieve it in a way that wasn’t offensive to the history of the civil rights movement.”
“Well, I think the candidates have got to understand that they have an obligation to our country to unify. Somebody’s going to lose this race with 49.8 percent of the vote. And that person has got to pull their supporters in behind the nominee.
“We are strong enough to struggle, and disagree, be angry, disappointed
and still come together at the end of the day and be united. The reason we
are able to do this is because all of us, together in our passion and our
emotion realize that this race is not about me, it’s not about Hillary
Clinton, Barack Obama, the RBC or the reporters who are here to cover the
event. It’s about restoring our great country.
“If it’s very very close, they [the superdelegates] will do what they want anyway,” said Mr Dean.
“I think the race is going to come down to the perception in the last six or eight races of who the best opponent for McCain will be. I do not think in the long run it will come down to the popular vote or anything else.”
“I’m not sure all of them are Clinton supporters,” he said. “I think some of them are having fun at the Democrats’ expense. I think shouting through somebody’s speech is low-class.”
“If you look at folks of color, even women, they’re more successful in the Democratic Party than they are in the white — excuse me — in the Republican Party.”
“Looking out from this podium tonight, I see this diverse assembly of Democrats as a testament to the strength and unity of our party and the fruition of our 50-state strategy,” the party chairman told the throng as he gaveled the convention to session.
I don’t think we have a unity problem at all. I think there’s a few people who can’t be satisfied, but we’ve got some very happy delegates with our ticket.
You reacted to all of Clinton’s feints and are just lucky she was never allowed to hit back, what with Nancy Pelosi pinning her arms behind her. You fell for McCain’s feints, too, and even let him lull you to sleep before he sucker punched you. Ha, ha. Welcome to combat, brother. Doesn’t do much good to stack the race deck, just to build a house of cards, now does it? This is high-stakes poker, for all the marbles. You blinked. You blew.
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign can honestly be called a Grand Experiment. It’s an experiment that the Democrats are betting will succeed, based largely on the fact that it accounts for Obama’s success in getting elected. To be sure, nobody can seriously claim to be swayed by the candidate’s record of legislative accomplishment, first they’d have to find it. No, it is Obama’s string of victories due primarily to his grassroots organizing efforts that have the party’s heart’s a-twitching like Chris Matthews’ tingly leg. Add Howard Dean’s fifty state strategy to the mix and you have the makings of a beautiful friendship.
Now, four years have passed. And the Democrats have nominated a candidate that seems perfectly equipped to test-drive the party’s 50-state vehicle. Obama has built his candidacy off of the pledge to expand the electoral playing field. Moreover, his campaign has leaned on an ability to drum up both grassroots support and the recruitment of Republicans and independents — two stated objectives of the Dean vision.
On Thursday, Obama symbolically endorsed the DNC’s efforts, declaring that Dean would remain party chairman heading into the general election.
The Obama/Dean association goes back much farther than June of this year, however. In 2004 Howard Dean founded Democracy For America after losing in the presidential primaries that year.
Governor Howard Dean founded Democracy for America in 2004 to build on the grassroots momentum for reform that his bid for the presidency sparked. The movement propelled DFA into a successful national organization committed to the “50 State Strategy.”
Their stated mission on their website is a simple one:
Democracy for America is our nation’s largest progressive political action community. With over 725,000 members nationwide, DFA is a grassroots powerhouse working to change our country and the Democratic Party from the bottom-up. We provide campaign training, organizing resources, and media exposure so our members have the power to support progressive issues and candidates up and down the ballot. Join us in the fight to take our country back!
But a longer statement outlining the group’s mission, dated June 20, 2004, goes into a little more detail:
DFA has a long-term goal that looks past November 2004. This organization will rebuild the Democratic Party from the bottom up — it will take time, but we must start building a base now for the future, just like the Republicans did 40 years ago.
I’ve written about the AstroTurfing activities of the ObamaNation and the TEA Partiers so often that I’ve started having nightmares about angry blindfolded protesters dressed as Native Americans dumping cases of Snapple on the floor of the Houston Astrodome for no other apparent reason than it’s fun to do on television. And, while the evidence of well-funded propagandists on both sides ginning up the outrage of ordinary citizens for sinister corporo-political purposes is overwhelming, for some reason, nobody wants to cop to the truth that their side is doing it, too.
I’ll be the first to admit that I did not come into this blogging business as the most politically astute or learned person on the planet. The idea that I might be is so far from the possibility of reality that the words I just typed hardly belong in the same sentence. I know that. However, watching my hopes for the election of a candidate I thought to be most qualified to “inherit” (I’m beginning to hate that word) the responsibility of guiding the county back on track be bashed, dashed, crashed and gleefully shattered to smithereens by disparate entities on the left and right, seemingly demented in their zeal, has given me an opportunity to learn and grow politically in a way unlikely to have been appreciated before, had it presented itself. And frankly, I’m sick of it.
Jim Dean is the current Chair of Democracy for America (DFA). As DFA’s key spokesperson and fundraiser, Jim keeps DFA in the national spotlight. Jim brings DFA’s mission across the country to all 50 states. He meets with candidates, organizers, party leaders and activists, inspiring everyone to get involved and take back our country. Jim has been involved with DFA since our founding in 2004. He has a long history of political involvement and was a key fundraiser for his brother, Howard’s campaigns for President, Governor and Lt. Governor.
Governor Howard Dean founded Democracy for America in 2004 to build on the grassroots momentum for reform that his bid for the presidency sparked. The movement propelled DFA into a successful national organization committed to the “50 State Strategy.”
