Can we stop this little self-pity party already?

Need we go back and revisit some of the things that have emanated from the DLC's wing over the past year? Little wonder that Dean might think they're not on his side.

Dean (and his supporters) have taken more crap than Bush has from other Democrats over the past year. Then he (mildly, and jokingly, from what I've heard) lashes out, and all we here is about how divisive HE is. Give me a break.

If you want to take the high road, and say that both sides need to knock this shit off, I'm with you. But otherwise, spare us the hand-wringing, OK?

Frankly, strannix, I'm not pissed at Dean on personal level -- if Sista Soulja-ing the DLC were good politics for the general election, I'd grin and bear it. But it's not, and you know that just as well as I do.

This election isn't about your feelings or mine; it's about sending the current occupant of the Oval Office back to Crawford, TX. And as long as Dean refuses to grow up and start acting like the kind of nominee who can bring the party together to get that job done, some of us are going to keep calling him on it.

"This election isn't about your feelings or mine; it's about sending the current occupant of the Oval Office back to Crawford, TX."

I disagree. I think this election is about rebuilding the Democratic Party in a very fundamental way. Ousting Bush is just a handy side effect, and a likely one at that if we succeed.

In case you haven't noticed, the Dems have almost completely lost power - only the occasional filibuster and the whims of Sandra O'Connor keep us hanging on.

The DLC way has led us into the political wilderness that Al From is always so worried about. That's a simple fact. Look around; it can barely get any worse, and all this has happened with Dean safely tucked away in Vermont.

Dean HAS been uniting the party. Again, in case you haven't noticed, he's been mending fences with the lefty activists that fled the party in 2000 with disastrous results. Yet I assume the endorsements of folks like Elaine Kamarck and Al Gore are significant to you, both party centrists with long DLC roots.

I'm not going to defend Dean's labeling of Clark as a Republican, although I don't believe questioning his Democrat-ness is out of line. But Dean has been rebuilding the party from the bottom up while the DLC (or in any case, the leadership of the DLC) has been busy whining about how unelectable he is. It's shameful, and making it even more shameful is when they turn around and call him divisive!

So, if ousting Bush is all that's important to you, keep up whatever it is you're doing. But note that the radical right worked its way into power without the help of George W Bush, and it stands to reason that they'll be there when he's gone. So unless we can rebuild our organization, any gains we make will be shallow and fleeting.

strannix --
1) "The DLC way has led us into the political wilderness that Al From is always so worried about. That's a simple fact."

The DLC playbook produced Bill Clinton, the only Democrat to have served two terms in the White House since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (For those of you keeping score at home, that's over half a century.) And that actually almost understates the size of problem the Democratic party was facing in the early nineties; Republicans had been in control of the White House for 20 of the previous 24 years.

2) I hope you're right that Dean is rebuilding the party, but there's no evidence for it so far. In fact, Dean has not even come close to meeting his own campaign's stated goals in this area. (550,000 Internet supporters as of Dec 31, not 900,000. And his grassroots fundraising either plateaued or fell slightly in the fourth quarter, depending on how you read the numbers.)

3) "But Dean has been rebuilding the party from the bottom up while the DLC (or in any case, the leadership of the DLC) has been busy whining about how unelectable he is. It's shameful, and making it even more shameful is when they turn around and call him divisive!"

Calling a candidate unelectable isn't an insult, it's a judgment -- one with which you're welcome to disagree. That's called politics. (Referring to your fellow party members as cockroaches and Republican turncoats, on the other hand....)

4) As I said above, I really hope you're right about all this. Perhaps Howard Dean is just the man to turn history on its head. I'm just not prepared to wager the future of the country on it.

Responding to your points:

1) Clinton is exactly what I'm talking about. Sure, he was elected, but what did eight years get us in terms of lasting gains? Whether by design or neglect, he left the party in shambles in 2000. This all happened on his watch - at least before 1992, we had Congress if not the White House.

Mind you, I don't have any inherent problems with the DLC, even if I wish Al From would take a hike. But they've insisted on taking a centrist strategy and turning it into a litmus test. What can be more divisve than that?

2) Clinton's Q4 1996 and Gore's Q4 2000 fundraising numbers both dipped from their Q3 numbers. Dean's raised slightly. I don't see a problem.

As for the supporter goals, those were set in January 2003, I believe, when they had a few *hundred* supporters. So they fell short, but they still exceeded everyone else's expectations by an order of magnitude or two.

As for evidence ... I don't know what to say. I think winning the endorsements of Bradley and Gore was quite a trick, although I agree it's hard to say at this point how many of Bradley's supporters are Dean people now. He's clearly caught on with a good part of the liberal activist crowd that went Green in 2000. He's been endorsed by a majority of the CBC now, I think, suggesting that he's making inroads into the minority vote.

Not sure what would constitute real evidence at this point, though.

3) "Republican turncoats?" Give me a break. I think the quote was "Republican wing of the Democratic Party," right? Considering how much From and Reed have blustered about how far left Dean is, which isn't true anyway, I think that's pretty mild.

"Unelectable" may or may not be an insult - there's certainly a none-too-subtle implication that his supporters are wasting their time - but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.