One of the top reasons I can stomach voting for Dean is the very slim but not totally insane (IMHO) hope that he might somehow prove to be the next FDR -- a straight candidate who goes native and helps the people once he's in office and faced with the actual bullshit.
No hope in this direction is even imaginable with the other Dead-mocrats. Despite his alleged "presidentialness," John Kerry is literally a psycho, in my book -- he's wasted his whole life on some pitiful, empty JFK fantasy. Talk about building sand castles on foundations of sand! I literally wouldn't walk across the street to listen to him.
And it won't ever matter, either, because, if he beats Dean, Bush will smash his sorry ass to bits. The Bush gang must be laughing their asses off right about now. Dean is their only conceivable problem.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Liza Featherstone" <lfeather at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 3:14 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Dean's Self-Demolition
> Totally agree with this. This is one of the reasons why Dean's defeat in
> Iowa was depressing (despite the fact that in policy terms, the Democrats
> are pretty similar to each other). Also depressing is the new post-Iowa
> conventional wisdom that grass-roots organization, and a capacity to
> mobilize and politicize people don't actually matter in an election. You
can
> see why elites would want to punish Dean for doing that, and make clear to
> others that it doesn't work. I'm also disturbed that the idealism and
> enthusiasm of the Dean volunteers - again, whatever one thinks of Dean -
is
> consistently viewed by the media as self-indulgent, silly and totally
> irrelevant to the political process. Whenever they write about a Dean
phone
> bank, it sounds like they're describing the Rainbow Gathering.
>
> Liza