The Dean Of Divisiveness

In this ever-changing, mixed-up world, thank goodness that we have the constant of Howard Dean’s mouth. Easily one of the most hypocritical political figures in the past generation, Dean decided to lecture America on “divisiveness”. Of course, he blamed Republicans for it, within hours of comparing one GOP candidate to a mass-murdering dictator and calling a visiting dignitary anti-Semitic:

Down with divisiveness was the message Wednesday delivered by Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean as he told a group of Florida business leaders that Republican policies of deceit and finger-pointing are tearing American apart.

Great modeling for that anti-divisiveness campaign, Howie.

The Republican agenda “is flag-burning and same-sex marriage and God knows what else,” Dean said. “We need real change in this country. We’re in trouble.”

And that would be …. less divisive? Actually, Dean was just cooling down from earlier statements, where he compared Katherine Harris to … Joseph Stalin. He also called visiting Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki an anti-Semite:

Democrat leader Howard Dean called the Iraqi prime minister an “anti-Semite” during an address before party loyalists on Wednesday, drawing a swift rebuke from Republicans. The Democratic National Committee chairman also called Republican Senate candidate Katherine Harris a “crook” and compared her to Stalin. …
“Thank God for Bill Nelson, because we’d have another crook in the United States Senate if it weren’t for him. He is going to beat the pants off Katherine Harris,” Dean said during his 20-minute address. “She doesn’t understand that it’s…improper to be chairman of a campaign and count the votes at the same time. This is not Russia and she is not Stalin.”

Recall, please, that the Dean of Divisiveness once defended the presumption of innocence for Osama bin Laden in relation to the 9/11 attacks, a presumption he didn’t bother granting Tom DeLay. Dean also called the Republicans the “white Christian party”, and famously revealed that he hates Republicans, “and everything they stand for”.
Dean doesn’t want to abandon divisiveness; he’s raised it to an art form, and it’s the only tool in his arsenal.
UPDATE: I forgot to give The Florida Masochist a hat-tip on the Harris link. Sorry, Bill!

Dean Flopping At DNC

A party chairman has two main functions, interrelated but not the same: building the voter base and raising funds. In the former role, the chair has to reach outside the base to bring in new voters while maintaining good relations with the people already inside the tent. The latter role gets measured more in opposition to what the other major party accomplishes during the same period.
In both tasks, it looks like the Howard Dean experiment has failed. Dean has spent most of the past year playing to a radical base with statements like “I hate Republicans and everything they stand for,” instead of working with liberal Republicans and center-minded independents that eschew that kind of hatred politics. Today, the Washington Post reports that Dean — whom the DNC selected for his prodigious fundraising ability in the last presidential primary season — has allowed another huge funding gap between the DNC and RNC to arise on the cusp of the mid-term elections:

The former Vermont governor and presidential candidate took the chairmanship of the national party eight months ago, riding the enthusiasm of grass-roots activists who relished his firebrand rhetorical style. But he faced widespread misgivings from establishment Democrats, including elected officials and Washington operatives, who questioned whether Dean was the right fit in a job that traditionally has centered on fundraising and the courting of major donors.
Now, the latest financial numbers are prompting new doubts. From January through September, the Republican National Committee raised $81.5 million, with $34 million remaining in the bank. The Democratic National Committee, by contrast, showed $42 million raised and $6.8 million in the bank. …
Several Washington Democrats not favorably inclined toward Dean said the party was willing to gamble on his “potential for hoof in mouth disease” — in the words of one lobbyist — because of the unexpected fundraising prowess he showed in the 2004 race.

Well, they got the disease in spades, but the money has mostly failed to arrive. With the midterm primaries less than three months away, the GOP has four times as much money in the bank as the Democrats, and they have done much more work in reaching outside of their traditional base for both voters and candidates. Ken Mehlman has drafted Lynn Swann to run as a Republican for the Pennsylvania governor’s race, and convinced Michael Steele to campaign for the Senate. What has Dean done to convince pro-life moderates to run for the Democrats, or even to vote for them?
By any measure, the Dean chairmanship has been a failure of embarrassing proportions for the Democrats, but now they’re stuck with him for at least one electoral cycle. If they fire him now, his radical-left base may well bolt to the Greens, and the Democrats can’t afford that at this point with so many of their other constituencies in flux. The other option will be to force a new staff on Dean that will reduce his role to that of a national figurehead while competent fundraisers and party builders take their orders from someone else. Expect Democrats to take the latter option and try to play catch-up to Mehlman and the GOP over the next 90 days.

Saddam Treated Women Better: Howard Dean

Howard Dean gave his opponents another reason to look forward to his television appearances and his supporters another cringe-worthy moment in his interview on Face the Nation yesterday. Dean told CBS viewers that a genocidal Saddam provided a better environment than what he expects will come from a democratic Iraq:

Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman who was the hero of his party’s anti-war wing before his gaffe-prone 2004 presidential candidacy crashed and burned in Iowa, still doesn’t think the Iraqis are better off with dictator Saddam Hussein out of power and in prison.
Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation” yesterday, the fiery former Vermont governor said, “It looks like today, and this could change, as of today it looks like women will be worse off in Iraq than they were when Saddam Hussein was president of Iraq.”

Of course, those mass graves certainly show plenty of evidence that Saddam Hussein considered himself an equal-opportunity genocidist. Under Saddam, women had all the same opportunities as men — to get tortured, raped, falsely imprisoned, starved off their land, and to serve as test subjects for his chemical-weapons programs, as in Halabja.
Mad How strikes again. How many strikes does he get before the DNC finally calls him out?

Dafydd: Flipper the Duck

Patterico has noticed an astonishing claim by Howard Dean — no, I mean astonishing even on the Dean Scale — a few days ago (I can’t find the exact date).
Here comes Mr. Chairman:

The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is “okay” to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is.

Let us all ponder this audacious argument. My old dictionary defines “chutzpah” as Lizzie Borden pleading for mercy from the judge on grounds that she’s an orphan. But next year’s edition will eschew written examples in favor of a photo of Chairman Dean.
What Dean has done, of course, is simply to flip the political identity of the justices on the Court; in Dean’s world, it was the “right-wing” caucus on the Court — Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Kennedy — that ruled in favor of the city of New London, CT, in the Kelo case; while the “left-wingers” (Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and O’Connor) desperately tried to stick up for the little guy. It’s Howard Dean through the looking glass!
Patterico has also noticed the thundering sound of a million crickets chirping in the MSM auditorium; or as Paul Simon (the successful singer, not the lefty senator) wrote, the “sounds of silence.” It’s hard to imagine so many quiet noises if it had been Bill Frist or Tom DeLay who casually flipped left and right; Dana Milbank in particular would have gotten at least four op-eds out of it.
In honor of Howard “Flipper” Dean, herewith, offered for your approval:
They call him Flipper, Flipper, quick to the cameras,
No-one you’ve seen, spins faster than Dean,
And we know Flipper, lives in a media bubble,
Truth lies in rubble, watch Howard preen!
MSM loves the king of the twist,
Tripe that he shoves they cannot resist,
Tricks he will do when cameras appear,
Sneer, smirk, slither, and smear!
He’s a hot tipper, Flipper, makes the news fright’ning,
Giddy they seem with “I Have a Scream,”
They know their Flipper feeds them the soundbites to plotz for,
Cheap dirty shots whore, he’s on their team!

The Devil Makes Him Do It?

After some disarray on how to handle their out-of-control party chairman, leading Democrats have finally arrived at a strategy to unite behind Howard Dean and his overactive mouth. They now blame the right-wing elements within the media for overreacting to his statements for reporting Dean’s comments:

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate yesterday blamed “the right wing” and elements of the press “in service to it” for repeating Howard Dean’s remarks about Republicans and inflating them out of proportion.
“I think we all understand what’s happening with you all,” said Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, in remarks echoing Hillary Rodham Clinton’s blaming a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for her husband’s legal-ethical woes.
“The right wing has got the agenda moving. Fox [News Channel] and everybody’s got the agenda. It’s all about Howard Dean. You’ve bought into it,” Mr. Durbin said.
“You can’t let up on it. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Other party leaders quickly followed suit. Harry Reid said that no one has avoided misspeaking in public, not even RNC chair and Dean counterpart Ken Mehlman, implying that the press somehow covers up for Mehlman where it reports everything that Dean says. Barbara Boxer claims his remarks were taken out of context, telling the media that they want “some kind of a controversy, so they don’t give the message of Howard Dean … We all know that the other side is bound and determined to hurt Howard Dean and destroy him, as they usually do with leaders of our party.”
No, you have not inadvertently surfed to Scrappleface.
When was the last time you heard Democrats complaining about their party leaders getting too much press coverage for their speeches? It isn’t as if this happened once and the press keeps bringing the same misstatement to their attention. As James Lakely notes, these comments come from almost every major speech Howard Dean gives — and since those speeches are given in representation of the Democratic Party, they do equate to news. The press also covers Mehlman’s speeches, but Mehlman doesn’t allow stupid, divisive, and bigoted remarks to fly out of his mouth like spittle from a madman.
Durbin, Reid, and Boxer are the ones who should be ashamed of themselves for blaming the messenger rather than Howard Dean himself for Dean’s hate-filled bile. How can these possibly be improved by context?

Mr. Dean, who took over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee four months ago, has caused a stir with a string of public statements that he “hates the Republican Party and everything it stands for” and that its members are “liars,” “evil,” “corrupt” and “brain-dead.” …
In February, he told the Congressional Black Caucus that the Republican Party “couldn’t get this many people of color in a single room” unless “they had the hotel staff in here.” And on Monday told a gathering of California journalists that the Republican “party is basically a white, Christian party,” a remark he defended on NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday morning.

And let’s not forget the recent comment that Republicans have never had to do an honest day’s work in their lives. I’m sure that message works very well among the Al Franken fringe of the party, and if that’s where the Democrats want to focus their efforts, then they’ve picked the right DNC chair. Dean epitomizes the transition of the Democrats into a party based on hate and the capture of the leadership by the radical Left that forms the base of Dean’s support.
Unfortunately, the elected Democratic leadership has chosen to abdicate to these haters and blame everyone but themselves for the problems it causes. When senior Democrats come fresh out of a strategy meeting and blame Republicans for what comes out of their DNC chair’s mouth, they’re only a short walk from Moonbat Land, where some already suspect that Dean may be working under orders from Karl Rove. If this is all that Democrats have to offer, they will be a minority party for a generation or more.

Dean Plays Race Card

Howard Dean continued his self-immolation as DNC chair yesterday, telling a San Francisco audience that the GOP was nothing more than a “white Christian party”, and then claimed he was just being “tough”:

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, unapologetic in the face of recent criticism that he has been too tough on his political opposition, said in San Francisco this week that Republicans are “a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It’s pretty much a white Christian party.”
“The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people,” Dean said Monday, responding to a question about diversity during a forum with minority leaders and journalists. “We’re more welcoming to different folks, because that’s the type of people we are. But that’s not enough. We do have deliver on things: jobs and housing and business opportunities.”

Howard’s last broadside, that Republicans never put in an honest day’s work, even had Democrats repelled. Two prominent Democratic politicians — Joe Biden and John Edwards, who’d like to run for President if Howard hasn’t destroyed the party by then — both said that Dean didn’t speak for them. He’s driving off major donors, claiming that the party needs to focus on Internet collections instead of deep-pocket patrons. However, the Democrats have raised less than half the money that the GOP has since the first of the year, and his rhetoric appears to be costing them support from the center.
This last charge is hilarious coming from Dean. Recall, please, what started the Dean collapse during the 2004 primary race. Dean came to the Iowa caucuses as the acclaimed frontrunner by raising prodigious amounts of money, thanks to Joe Trippi and his visionary outreach. He had the momentum and had captured the imagination of the party. The Iowa caucuses were expected to anoint him as the dragonslayer against the hated George Bush.
Then the Iowa debate came on January 11th, and it all slipped away — and race was his Kryptonite, and Al Sharpton his Lex Luthor. Sharpton skewered Dean so badly that he left the Vermont governor blinking into the cameras like Dan Quayle in 1988 in his debate against Lloyd Bentson:

SHARPTON: I want to — you know, I have to ask this. I was going to ask Dennis something.
But I have to ask you this, Governor Dean, because I was disappointed you weren’t in Washington the other day. But you keep talking about talking about race. In the state of Vermont — where you were governor ’97, ’99, 2001 — not one black or brown held a senior policy position, not one. You yourself said we must do something about it. Nothing was done.
Can you explain — since now you want to convene everyone and talk about race, it seems as though you have discovered blacks and browns during this campaign. How you can explain not one black or brown working for your administration as governor?
DEAN: Well, actually, I beg to differ with your statistics there.
SHARPTON: This is according to your paper in Vermont, the Associated Press, and the Center for Women in Government.
DEAN: Well, perhaps you ought not to believe everything in the Associated Press.
SHARPTON: Oh, so you’re saying they’re incorrect?
DEAN: We do have African-American and Latino workers in state government, including…
SHARPTON: No, no, I said under your administration. Do you have a senior member of your cabinet that was black or brown?
DEAN: We had a senior member of my staff on my fifth floor.
SHARPTON: No, your cabinet.
DEAN: No, we did not.
SHARPTON: OK, that’s not…
DEAN: … six members.
SHARPTON: Then you need to let me talk to you about race in this country.
DEAN: Well, let me just say one thing, which I have said before but I’ll say it again. If the percentage of African-Americans in your state was any indication of what your views on race were, then Trent Lott would be Martin Luther King.
SHARPTON: But I don’t think that that answers the question. I think if you’re talking — if you want to lecture people on race, you ought to have the background and track record in order to do that. And I think that clearly people — governors import talent, governors reach all over the country to make sure they have diversity.
And I think that, while I respect the fact you brought race into this campaign, you ought to talk freely and openly about whether you went out of the box to try to do something about race in your home state and have experience with working with blacks and browns at peer level, not as just friends you might have had in college.

The bombshell from the Reverend came as a shock to the national audience, which had never seen the Vermont fireplug stumble so badly — and the Democrats suddenly started to question not only Dean’s qualifications to address race but his ability to withstand the heat of a general election.
Now Mad How wants to talk about race again. All I can say is that I’ve seen the Reverend Al Sharpton, Howard — and you are no Reverend Al. And you of all people should know that.

The Coming Dean Debacle

The selection of Howard Dean as DNC party chairman has clearly become a liability for Democrats looking to recapture the center, as Donald Lambro writes in today’s Washington Times. Democratic pollsters have discovered a significant ‘parents gap’ in last year’s presidential election, as Bush topped Kerry by almost 20 points among moms and dads. Not only did these mainstream voters find more alignment with Bush, but the active sellout of the Democrats to the Hollywood entertainment elite producing ever more violent and inappropriate fare for children have turned large numbers of them away:

An analysis by a Democratic think tank argues that Democrats are suffering from a severe “parent gap” among married people with children, who say the entertainment industry is lowering the moral standards of the country.
The study, published last week by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, admonishes Democrats to pay more attention to parental concerns about “morally corrosive forces in the culture,” and warns that the party will not fare better with this pivotal voting bloc until they do.
In the 2004 election, married parents supported President Bush over Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts by nearly 20 percentage points. Mr. Bush frequently talked about the importance of faith and morals in his campaign and the role that parents played in raising their children. Mr. Kerry and his party, much of whose campaign funding and political support came from liberals in the entertainment industry, rarely touched the issue.
“Democrats will not do better with married parents until they recognize one simple truth: Parents have a beef with popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages,” said the study’s author, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University and a senior fellow at PPI.

Remember the moment in New York when John Kerry declared that the potty-mouthed antics of Whoopi Goldberg and her friends constituted the “heart and soul” of America? At the time, it hardly made a blip in Kerry’s polling, and probably by that time most parents had already decided to support Bush instead for the reasons given. However, that moment cemented Kerry and the Democrats as fatally out of touch with mainstream Americans. Neither Democrats nor Hollywood has yet to get the message.
Howard Dean’s installation as DNC chair proves that much. Dean represents the radical left of the party, wrapped up in a tie and rolled-up shirtsleeves but extremists nonetheless. Democrats wanted to harness the energy and power of the International ANSWER/MOveOn contingent by embracing them through Dean rather than pushing them towards the Greens. However, as the Democrat polling shows, all Dean does is attract more obstacles for reaching out to centrists:

In an attempt to reach out to evangelical Christians in the Republican red states, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has been talking much more about values and “the culture,” and sprinkling his attacks on Republicans with phrases from the Bible.
“We need to kick the money changers out of the temple and restore moral values to America,” he said last week in Florida.
But an online survey of 11,568 Dean supporters released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center found that such religious or culturally conservative appeals may not play well with liberal Democrats.
Among the Pew findings, 38 percent of Dean supporters polled said they had no religious affiliation, compared with 11 percent of all Americans; 91 percent supported same-sex “marriage,” compared with 38 percent of all Democrats; and 80 percent said they were liberals, compared with 27 percent of all Democrats.

For a man who notoriously gave up his religious affiliation over a bike path, spouting Bible verses will not likely convince any of the faithful that the Democrats have suddenly opened their arms to religious voters. Opposition of key Senate Democrats to judicial nominees with “deeply held personal beliefs” speaks much louder to churchgoing Americans than a couple of Biblical non-sequiturs from Dean. Dean’s pandering on religion won’t win him any support, but according to the results above, it could severely cut into his personal approval base if he does it often and publicly enough.
The Democrats have wound up with the worst of both worlds with Howard Dean. He’s too radical to appeal to the voters in the center with any credibility at all, and if he gives more than a token effort to do so, he’ll lose the people who put him in power at all. We tried to warn them … but they just wouldn’t listen to us.

Dean Visits Kansas, Gets Snubbed By Dem Governor

Howard Dean fulfilled a pledge made during his campaign for the DNC chair by visiting and rallying Democrats in a Midwestern red state. Dean went to Kansas yesterday, a state that has supported GOP presidential candidates since Goldwater in 1964, and railed against Social Security reforms and budget deficits. He also urged Democrats to “show up”, inadvertently highlighting an embarassing snub:

The former presidential candidate and Vermont governor criticized President Bush’s budget record and plans for Social Security while urging people to get involved in politics no matter what their philosophy. …
Before his selection as DNC chairman this month, Dean said he would bolster local and state party organizations even in the nation’s most conservative areas.
“How do we expect those places to vote Democratic when we don’t even show up?” Dean said during Thursday’s speech.
Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who was elected in a 2002 race marked by tensions between moderate and conservative Republicans, hadn’t planned to attend any of Dean’s events.

So the highest-ranking Democrat in Kansas has no plans to be seen in public with the leader of her party? That certainly sends a message, and not the one Dean intended when he embarked on his red-state tour. Sebelius knows that any indication of support for Dean and his MoveOn-sponsored agenda would be the kiss of death for her political career in Kansas and wants to stay far away from Mad How.
If the Democrats seriously want to engage the moderates, they picked the wrong man to lead them. No one doubts that leftists and radicals live in places like Kansas, but no one except Howard Dean thinks they can win elections for the Democrats. Sebelius obviously has better political instincts for the heartland than the DNC, and she’s using them to avoid Dean. Democrats hanging onto office in other red states will follow the lead of Sebelius and wind up making a mockery of Dean’s tour throughout red-state America.
Dean has it wrong: it isn’t enough to simply show up. You have to have a platform that appeals to moderates, and Dean and MoveOn don’t have it. Sebelius knows this and knows that sometimes, showing up is too much to ask.

Why Howard Dean Will Cost The Democrats More Elections

The rationale for the DNC’s selection of Howard Dean as party chair has been that he “energized their base,” driving many new voters into electoral politics and creating a juggernaut for his campaign. Despite his eventual humbling during the primary, the Democrats still want to harness that effort and star quality of Howard Dean to provide energy and momentum for their attempt to reverse three straight election-cycle setbacks. However, as Dan Balz points out in today’s Washington Post, the Democrats appear clueless as to how Dean’s leadership will affect the party’s direction:

The bloggers have been busy on the Democratic National Committee Web site since Howard Dean was elected party chairman a week ago.
“Paul in OC” and “Steviemo in MN” wrote that they had made their first-ever contributions to the national committee. Someone identified as “J” pleaded with Dean to come to Florida, “home of Baby Bush,” to “heal the irritating red and help us become a cool blue state again.” “Donna in Evanston” wrote, “It’s sad, but it is up to the grassroots to set the example for our representatives in Washington. Howard gets it. Maybe some day the beltway bunch will get it too.” …
But the rising of this grass-roots force also signals a shift in the balance of power within the party, one that raises questions about its ultimate impact on a Democratic Party searching for direction and identity after losses in 2002 and 2004.
At a minimum, say party strategists, the shift will mean a more confrontational Democratic Party in battles with President Bush and the Republicans. But some strategists worry that the influence of grass-roots activists could push the party even further to the left, particularly on national security, reinforcing a weakness that Bush exploited in his reelection campaign.

It only takes a bit of short-term memory to remind people how an obscure Vermont governor vaulted John Kerry and a slate of nationally-known Democrats to a huge fundraising and popularity lead early in the electoral cycle. He calculated that the energy of the opposition primarily came from the coterie of leftist groups opposing Bush on the war on terror, a faction that DLC adherents and Clintonites had kept at arms’ length, for good reason. Dean became the first credible candidate to give patronage to the radical elements of MoveOn and International ANSWER, the latter an openly unreconstructed neo-Stalinist group. In doing so, he radicalized the election and eventually forced Kerry to appropriate Dean’s message when Dean wilted under the pressure in Iowa.
The pressure to continue that change into the highest ranks of the Democratic Party comes from these same groups and their financial backers, people like George Soros, last seen funding the defense of Lynne Stewart, who eventually got convicted of abetting Islamofascist terrorism. The head of the MoveOn PAC, Eli Pariser, wants that kind of demarcation between the two parties, demanding the kind of ideological purity that has lost the center over the past four years:

“I think it’s pretty clear that the era of triangulation is over,” he said. “The reason for that is that if you step halfway between Republicans and Democrats, you get your head cut off by Republicans. There’s no compromise and no mercy, so I think it’s pretty clear that Democrats need to be an opposition that can explain why we believe the current administration is corrupt and misleading the country. It’s not something you can do easily by putting yourself somewhere between the poles.”

In other words, the people that the DNC hope to energize by bringing Dean on as chair do not want to attract the centrists back to the party, and are openly disdainful of those who put themselves somewhere between the poles. These Democrats want their party to be the Super-Greens, Democrats in name only in the space of a generation removed from Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
It’s their party now, as has been said; Soros bought it and he apparently runs it. Dean proved to be both strategically and tactically clueless when the heat got applied in January 2004, and his ideology and attraction threatens much the same result when he takes the reins for next year’s midterm elections. When Hillary Clinton — the woman who tried to nationalize the American health-care system — represents the center-right of any party, then that party has marginalized itself into oblivion. They may truly find themselves facing the same fate as the Whigs of two centuries ago.

Howard Dean Finally Wins A National Election

Howard Dean finally manages to win a nationwide Democratic election, although he had to have everyone else drop out of the race first to do it. The New York Times reports that Dean is the last man standing for DNC chair after Rep. Tim Roemer dropped out:

Timothy J. Roemer, the last of Howard Dean’s rivals in the race for Democratic national chairman, dropped out on Monday, assuring Dr. Dean of victory.
Mr. Roemer, a former congressman from Indiana, had been backed by the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, and had staked out a position as the most conservative alternative to Dr. Dean.

Roemer didn’t leave the race quietly, however:

But as he dropped out Monday, he stood his ground. He said Democrats had allowed President Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, to define the party’s abortion politics, and called on Democratic leaders to become more inclusive.
“Some in our party have tried to make that a radioactive anvil around my neck,” Mr. Roemer said of the abortion issue. “I’ve had everything, including a couple of kitchen sinks, thrown at me the last few weeks. But I’m not deterred.”

Roemer’s warning will likely go unheeded by the firebrand Dean, whose initial lead in the Democratic primaries melted away as soon as the first votes were held. Dean famously also melted down in the crucible of Iowa, first in a Dan Quayle moment with Al Sharpton at the pre-caucus debate, and then in an absurd post-caucus appearance that gave the impression of a severe separation from reality. Now the man who couldn’t even win a single primary except in his home state of Vermont despite raising $40 million and leading in virtually every poll will lead the Democrats in strategizing their comeback from the wilderness.
If the Democrats wanted to cement their status as a minority party, they couldn’t do a better job. Is anyone awake at the DNC?