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I
read conservative pieces, liberal pieces and most of what falls in between because,
well, I need a hobby.
The
reaction that I find most interesting is the idea that Dean was a figure with
potential to do grievous harm to the Democrats. This outlook is summed up in the
following comment by conservative commentator Rich Lowry: Howard Dean was "a
noxious influence on the Democrats and our national politics. We should want the
Democrats to be as reasonable and responsible as possible, and John Kerry is more
of both those things than Howard Dean." I'm
not sure I even know what noxious means. Maybe it's Latin for DeLay? However,
my hunch is that reasonable and responsible means wanting a Democrat who is unlikely
to change the parameters of the current political debate. The heart of the Dean
campaign is held within the following statement I heard Dean repeat many times: "Calvin
Coolidge said, "The business of America is business," but forgot that
human beings are not meant to be cogs in an enormous government corporate machine
- that we are spiritual people who need connections and have to have community
again." I
would bet that statement is more disturbing to both Republicans and establishment
Democrats than his assertion that Americans were not safer after the capture of
Saddam Hussein. The
Dean campaign, in its soul, was radical. He was arguing for a fundamental societal
shift to sharply scale back the amount of leeway business interests have carved
out for themselves over the past 25 years. Dean saw a big picture other major
Democratic contenders have shown no sign of grasping. To
them, co-opting the Dean agenda meant hitting the compilation of Dean talking
points in order to caress a crowd. Dean saw them as a series of symptoms stemming
from a core disease. So what are the symptoms and what is the disease Dean had
put at the heart of his rationale for running? The
symptoms are easy enough to spot. The corporate frauds of Enron, Arthur Andersen,
Tyco, etc., have been the most glaring and public. Wal-Mart recently has been
cited as forcing its already low-paid employees to work overtime without compensation.
The
Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy believes that the top 250 companies
pay less than half of the 35 percent tax rate. The abuse and excessive manipulation
of the tax code by corporations, with the help of accounting and law firms, has
resulted in the share of total government tax revenues paid by corporations to
fall from a 50-year average of 17 percent to 7 percent. But corporations have
been aided in their power grab by government policies. Reacting to a disappointing
employment report this month, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, had this reaction: "The
stock market is, after all, the final arbiter. And the stock market was very strong
this morning in reaction to the news we have just received." The
stock market has become not only the final arbiter of economic news, but also
the main repository of influence in this country. Corporate America's response
to the fraud exposed in the past few years was to exclaim that there were a few
bad apples. The imposition of regulations enforcing the mere standard of transparency
and accountability was decried as too arduous a burden. The
moral and decent men who reside at the helm of the great majority of our country's
corporations behave as if the companies owe nothing to the country within which
they exist, save that they maximize profit. This is the disease diagnosed by the
Dean campaign. The
last time the political agenda in this country was set by the Democrats was pre-1980.
For the past 25 years, the Democrats have been on the defensive - scoring points
where they could while trying to transform themselves into something believed
to be more appealing to the voting public. Even the Clinton years were spent on
theses defensive maneuvers. Triangulation became a word for doing the best the
party could with an agenda set by Republicans. The
Dean campaign was an attempt at a total reversal in the political wrestling match
our two major political parties wage. His repeated exhortation to his supporters
that they had the power to take their country back was not the empty slogan of
a presidential campaign. Rather,
it was an assertion that a Dean administration would be marked by the attempt
to right the power imbalance that exists between a free market that enriches us
and vigorous government regulation, which perpetuates our democracy. So,
I understand why some conservatives would find his presence noxious to the current
debate. And many Democrats are relieved at having saved themselves from finding
out whether the American voting public would like them for who they truly are. * This
article was written as a counterpoint to an earlier opinion piece by Emma Margraf,
titled: Howard Dean
is a believer.
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