Democrats choose a nut as their chairman

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the crazy Democrats, a topic of fascination here through 2003 and 2004. In the late fall of 2003, Howard Dean was the unstoppable favorite for the Democratic nomination. Then came the month of December 2003, during which Dean almost daily made some incredibly whacky, self-disqualifying statement. (As I interpreted it afterward, Dean did not want to be president, he was running for the fun of it and knew he lacked the wherewithal to be president, so when he saw he might actually win he sabotaged his own candidacy by giving full rein to his inner Mr. Hyde.) Then came his defeat in the Iowa caucuses, and the scream, and the demise of his candidacy without a single primary victory. At the time I wrote that Dean was a classic American story, the man of shadowy identity who comes out of nowhere to blaze across the heavens, becoming the Star, the Inevitable One, and who then just as quickly falls back into the obscurity from which he came.

Except that, instead of leaving Dean to his well deserved oblivion, the Democrats then chose this truculent adolescent, this total whack-job (sorry, but more dignified language is impossible in the present case), to be the national chairman of their party! He hasn’t changed from the ignorant, angry college student I saw when I first watched one of his speeches, except that, if possible, he’s even worse now, most recently saying that he “hates” Republicans, that Republicans are “evil,” and the Democrats are “good.” Of course, the burning questions among Democrats since November 2004 are why they lost and what they can do to improve their future prospects. Dean’s latest answer is that the Republicans are “brain-dead,” while Democrats, major intellectuals that they are, are held back by a tendency to explain every issue in detail. Yeah, that’s the Dems all right, their speeches are just too intellectual! So the Democrats, he says, have to imitate the Republicans—by, presumably becoming brain dead themselves, and just give the people really, really simple messages.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2005 03:48 PM | Send