Dean and the unDeans
Mark Steyn surveys the field of Democratic unDeans and is mightily unimpressed: "The last refuge of the defeated." (Courtesy of Malcolm Smordin.)
Steyn fleshes out the point I tried to make yesterday about the desirability of a Democratic candidate who provides a clear contrast with President Bush: "I think the people deserve a choice on the war: Bush vs Lieberman doesn’t give them one; Bush vs Kerry or Clark or some other pretzel gives them a sort of choice but it’s so nuanced up the wazoo no one has a clue what it is. Bush vs Dean makes it plain: a guy who wants to take the war to the terrorists and the states who sponsor, harbour and train them versus a guy who thinks it’s about, if anything, liaising with Interpol and serving injunctions. I think we know which candidate Saddam, Mullah Omar, Boy Assad and the Pyongyang nutjob would vote for."
Steyn also concisely captures Dean himself: "Dean seems likely to complete the party’s transformation from a mass movement into an upscale niche business. Whenever he talks about the south, he sounds condescending. Likewise, the religious. Likewise, blacks. The Park Avenue populist is the perfect standard-bearer for an upper-middle-class college-town party."
The current New Yorker carries a long profile of Howard Dean that is both interesting and illuminating: "Running on instinct." (Courtesy of No Left Turns.) The piece includes many telling details.
Here Dean speaks of his undergraduate education at Yale and concludes with an attack on Bush -- comparing him, not to Hitler, but rather to the Communist rulers of the former Soviet Union: "I took courses about the wider world: Marxism, philosophy, different societies, particularly African. I took a lot of history. One professor who made a big impression was Wolfgang Leonhard, who taught Russian history. He’d been a Party official in East Germany and had defected. A fantastic lecturer. He once told us, ‘Pravda lies in such a way that not even the opposite is so.’ That really hit home. I felt he wasn’t just referring to the Soviet government but to our own at the time. You knew it from some of the things Nixon talked about—denying the bombing of Cambodia—or from Kissinger’s ‘Peace is at hand’ statement, when clearly peace wasn’t at hand. They said these things just to get reëlected. I think there are some similarities between George Bush’s Administration and Richard Nixon’s Administration: a tremendous cynicism about the future of the country; a lack of ability to instill hope in the American people; a war which doesn’t have clear principles behind it; and a group of people around the President whose main allegiance is to each other and their ideology rather than to the United States." The benefits of a Yale education!
