DEAN'S VIRTUES John Podhoretz
'I REALLY hope Democrats do not wise up and fire this guy. He's priceless." So says a Republican blogger about Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party.
The blogger, Alexander McClure of Polipundit.com, was responding to Dean's latest bit of news-making: Calling the Fox News Channel "a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party" even as he was saying "I don't comment on Fox News."
"What does this say," McClure asks with undisguised glee, "about all the Democrats who have appeared on Fox News?" He has called Dean "the gift that keeps on giving," because ever since the former Vermont governor who was briefly the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination won his party's chairmanship, he has been spewing anti-Republican bile left, left and center.
Why would a loyal Republican be so enthusiastic about the political tenure of a man who has said GOP members "have never made an honest living in their lives" and who has dismissed the GOP for being a strictly "white Christian" party?
The remarks have delighted Republican strategists because they are so vicious they threaten a backlash against Democrats -- and are worrisome to Democrats in equal measure for the same reason. Vice President Cheney went on Fox News last night and criticized Dean, a move that will only stoke the story and keep it smoking.
Republicans want the American people to think that truculent rich-boy Howard Dean from crunchy-granola Vermont is the true face and the true voice of the Democratic Party. And Democrats appear to be afraid of exactly the same thing, which is why 2008 presidential hopeful Mark Warner, the governor of Virginia, is taking the lead in speaking out against Dean.
What's more, Democrats have good reason to fear. Dean's Democratic National Committee has raised less than half of what the Republican National Committee has received in contributions. Now, it's true that with Republicans in charge of the House, Senate and the White House, they have a lot to raise money on.
But last year, more money was raised by Democrats and left-wing groups than by Republicans and right-wing groups, so it's not as if there's nowhere for Dean and his people to turn for dollars.
Still, it's not quite clear Republicans should be gleeful. Dean serves several useful purposes for his party, and history may record that he was the perfect man for the job in 2005.
Democrats generated a great deal of passion in 2003 and 2004, and to some extent that passion produced spectacular results: 59 million votes cast for John Kerry, the second largest vote total in American history. (Unfortunately for them, President Bush pulled 62 million, the largest total.)
The great danger for Democrats is that the passion they generated will dissipate, given that George W. Bush will no longer be running for office. That passion helped raise money when the money was needed and helped motivate young liberals and leftists to organize in ways they never had been motivated before.
Democrats can't afford to lose that passion, not with a Republican electoral machine whose gears and cogs are meshing like the innards of a Swiss watch. Dean's unyielding attitude toward his rivals - "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for" -- is valuable to the extent that it may keep those negative emotions roiling among partisan Democrats who might otherwise give up for a while and go tend their gardens.
And by defining the outer limit of his party, Dean may be offering the Democrats who want to run for president an unmistakable opportunity. By playing the role of the lunatic leftist, he makes it far easier for them to seem like the souls of moderation. By talking crazy, he makes everybody else seem sane.
"You never know what is enough," said the crazy genius poet-artist William Blake, "until you know what is more than enough." Howard Dean is more than enough. Maybe Hillary will seem like just enough by contrast. E-mail: podhoretz at nypost.com