Burnt Orange Report

Dean's no McGovern

By Andrew Dobbs

The aforementioned Dean post...

I feel that it is necessary to respond to the whole “Dean is the McGovern of 2004” meme. George McGovern was of course the Democratic candidate for president in 1972 that lost 49 states (winning only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia) to Richard Nixon. He emerged as the candidate after a messy primary battle in which establishment favorites such as Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie fell victim to the liberal insurgent, a scenario that many in the media claim to see developing as Gephardt and Kerry and co. are taking hits from Gov. Dean. But as usual the talking heads seem to have little to no grasp of history or even of what Dean stands for.

I think that it is telling that Dean attended the 1964 Republican National Convention with his parents, who were Rockefeller delegates. Dean holds similar positions to the old Rockefeller Republicans- fiscal conservatism, social progressivism and a strong yet cautious military policy. But in the 40 years since that time the GOP has moved so far to the right that there is no room in their party for Rockefellers any more; the only Rockefeller in congress today is a Democrat- Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Dean is a Rockefeller Democrat, and in a day and age where a sense of history or commitment to anything beyond one’s own self-promotion is absent from our nation’s capital, the punditocracy of that city have no other way of categorizing Governor Dean than as a McGovernite.

Dean’s foreign policy seems to be the source of much of the worries of the Democratic elite. The DLC and other Democratic “leaders” thought that if they went ahead and voted for Bush’s war on Iraq and didn’t worry their pretty little heads that maybe, somehow, the emperor would actually have some clothes. They were wrong. They lost miserably because their little drag act didn’t appeal to real live hawks in the GOP base and simply turned off sensible doves in the Dem base. They didn’t learn their lesson and now the architect of the disastrous triangulation ploy, Dick Gephardt, and the dove today, hawk tomorrow Waffler-in-Chief John Kerry think that an ambiguous and ill-conceived foreign policy is advisable while a foreign policy that essentially mirrors that of Jack Kemp or Nelson Rockefeller- that we should maintain a strong armed force to defend our freedom or the freedom of our allies but that we should only use it when absolutely necessary- is radical and McGovernite. This is absurd. Howard Dean’s finance chair, Dave Grossman, is the former chair of the conservative pro-Israel group AIPAC, Dean supported the first Gulf War (when an ally of the United States was invaded by a belligerent power) and the War on Terror (when an enemy of the United States murdered 3000 Americans in one fell swoop). Exactly what about this policy is McGovernite? If anything it is too conservative for many Democrats, but it is anything but “weak” as the DLC has characterized it. Weakness is voting one way in Washington and talking another way in Iowa.

Both Dean and the GOP have come a long way from that 1964 Republican Convention. Governor Dean went from New York to Vermont, from blue blood to green mountain boy, from a stock broker to a doctor, from a DLC celebrated Governor to a DLC condemned presidential candidate. There is no longer any room in the GOP for someone who believes that the simple principle of only spending what money you have or that the government should stay out of the business of morality or that our military ought to be strong but wary of war. If big, irresponsible, reckless government was the hallmark of McGovern’s platform, then it appears that the Republican Party carries his mantle far better than Howard Dean ever has.