Democrats and their Dean problem

Joe Biden backs away

Except:

Asked about recent comments where Dean trashed Republicans as "evil" and said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay belongs in jail, Biden told ABC's "This Week": "He doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats."

Asked if he thought Democrats needed to "rein [Dean] in," Biden said, "I don't presume to suggest that I could rein in any chairman. But I think that the response from the bulk of the elected Democrats - I don't imagine would be much different."

"I hope [Dean] listens," added the Delaware Democrat.

John Edwards (remember him?) positions himself elsewhere

Excerpt:

Edwards also disagreed with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean's controversial comment in a speech to liberal activists Thursday that many Republicans "have never made an honest living in their lives."

"The chairman of the DNC is not the spokesman for the party," Edwards said. "He's a voice. I don't agree with it."

I say:

It's a sad sight when a defeated party eats its own. Everyone's looking for someone to blame. Someone other than himself. That's no way to rise from the ashes. You've got to live and learn, not deny and die. Yes, Dean's seriously f***ed up, and he always has been. So what's he doing in that position? What systematic failure put him there? That's the real question here, and nobody seems to be asking it.

Kerry was a terrible choice for a candidate, and it's the fault of the Democrat voters for not seeing that from the beginning. Was it that they couldn't see, or that they just didn't want to see? Dean was a terrible choice as well, and at least the voters saw that early on. But then the DNC went and appointed him the party's chairman. What on earth were they thinking?

Here's a clue: the common rationale for Dean as party chairman is his fundrasing abilities. This dovetails with a lot of other talk coming from the Democrats and from the Left (not the same thing, but it's getting ever harder to spearate them) They talk of politics as marketing, and of marketing as advertising. They think they lost on 2004 because they didn't "get the message out enough." Well, the message got out plenty. The problem was it met with massive sales resistance. A bigger ad budget isn't going to fix this. When you lose votes with your message, you can't make it up on volume.

And now they're all worshipping Hillary as their savior du jour. Good luck with that. She knows how to triangulate, but American sales resistance is up so high it's probably too late for that to make a difference. Plus, she's a Clinton. "Bill Clinton without the party in his pants" said one pundit. That's a bad thing, by the way. Red America is sick of phonies, and all these people can think to do is to pick a more convincing phony.

It seems the only way the Democrat party can catch a break is if the Republicans hand it to them. Witness that business with the judicial appointments. By the way, the appeasers will be remembered when the Republican party undergoes its mitosis and becomes the new two party system.


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