Come Back To the Five & Dime, Howie Dean

By Michael Blanding, AlterNet. Posted June 27, 2005.

Since he became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean has made a big deal about returning the party to the grassroots. For the past few weeks, he has been barnstorming the country holding fundraisers that seem only one step removed from the populist rallies of his presidential campaign. At an event this week in Boston, for example, guests paid just $50 each to attend. Jeans and T-shirts far outnumbered suits, and hot dogs and popcorn replaced the customary canapes.  

Jumping up to the podium, Dean looked tanned and relaxed, instantly swinging into a modified stump speech from his campaign. Many of his favorite lines from the presidential race were still in circulation, touching on issues like Social Security ("Enron and the boys") and universal healthcare ("even the Costa Ricans"), and adding some new lines to suit the times, like: "The Republicans' view of small government is just big enough to fit inside Terri Schiavo's hospital bed."  

The one issue Dean barely mentioned, however, is the one that helped lift his presidential campaign out of obscurity: The war in Iraq.

Dean's early tirades against the war galvanized the grassroots of the party in 2003, to the extent that thousands of people who had long been disillusioned with the political process were willing to attend house party fundraisers in his honor. Now that public opinion has swung in favor of setting a timetable for bringing American troops home (in a recent Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent were in favor of bringing home "some or all" of the troops), Dean has been silent, or worse, supportive of the President's increasing quagmire. His stance seems to betray the grassroots activists who propelled him into the role of DNC chair in the first place.  

Two months ago, Dean stood before a crowd in Minnesota and said of Iraq: "Now that we're there, we're there and we can't get out.... I hope the President is incredibly successful with his policy now." After those comments, the other main anti-war candidate in the presidential race, Dennis Kucinich, chided Dean in an open letter, writing:

Did these words really come from the same man who claimed to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, and who had recently campaigned on the antiwar theme? ... We can draw no clearer distinction with the President than over this war... The Democratic leadership should be pressing for quick withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.

This past week, Kucinich co-sponsored a bipartisan resolution in the House calling for exactly that -- or at least as close to that as possible in a Republican-controlled Congress, a plan to start bringing the troops home by October 2006. Other Democrats have followed suit, with Senator Russ Feingold introducing a similar measure in the Senate, and 60 members of the House forming an Out of Iraq Caucus, led by members of the Black and Progressive Congressional Caucuses.

Sensing, perhaps, that there is political capital to seize on the Iraq issue, even Democratic members of Congress who were at the core of the propaganda movement calling for the invasion, like Senator Joe Biden, or those who subsequently supported it, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have now offered their own -- albeit tepid -- calls for withdrawal.  

So why not Dean? Many of the Democrats who were at the fundraiser in Boston defended the chair's stance on the occupation, even if they were in favor of the withdrawal themselves.

"I feel like he's waffling," said Claire Schlosser, who suppored Dean during the election. "His whole primary campaign was about being anti-war." In the next breath, however, she gushed about his job as DNC chair, saying, "If someone were to ask me what leadership is, he would come to mind."

Her friend, Carl Offner, said he was strongly in favor of bringing the troops home from Iraq; yet, he too spoke fondly of Dean's support of grassroots activists. "There is a welling up of the base, and Dean is not standing in the way," he said. "He's giving voice to that breath of fresh air."  

The disconnect between Dean's stance on troop withdrawal and activists' support of the chair may be in part due to the changed situation in Iraq, which has gone from the black-and-white issue of invasion to the more complicated issue of how and when to get out. Despite the polls, an informal sampling of Democrats at the fundraiser found more nuanced responses to withdrawal than "some", "all" or "none"-- with many genuinely conflicted about how to best clean up the mess in the region. At the same time, nearly all of them approved of the way Dean was doing his job, praising him for his ability to speak his mind and his effort to cut the party off from its addiction to corporate donors.  

Michael Blanding is a freelance writer living in Boston. Read more of his stuff at MichaelBlanding.com.

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