Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Peggy Noonan, who coined the term "thousand points of light" as a speechwriter for George Bush the Elder, provided a clue to a shift in strategy away from Dean the elitist to Dean the pugnacious.  Noonan wrote in a Wall Street Journal article that Dean "doesn't seem like a WASP.  

I know it's not nice to deal in stereotypes, but there seems very little Thurston Howell III, or George Bush the elder for that matter, in Mr. Dean ... He seems unpolished, doesn't hide his aggression, is proudly pugnacious.  He doesn't look or act the part of the WASP."

Noonan's declaration that "it's not nice to deal in stereotypes" is amusing in view of the perpetual strategy of Karl Rove and the Bushies along with compliant media types to stereotype opponents, as well as her resorting to stereotype with Dean.  

Note the shift as Republican insider on the one hand states that Dean, while not appearing waspish in demeanor, appears instead to be "unpolished" while not hiding his "aggression" along with being "proudly pugnacious."  

A new ploy was adopted.  Dean was unstable, too mean and aggressive to be president.  To anyone completely uninformed about Dean one would expect, based on reports about him, that anyone straying into his path and looking at him cross-eyed risked being sent into instant traction by the Type A, macho and combative former Governor of Vermont.

Much was made of the fact that Dean was a high school wrestler.  The conventional media wisdom that spun from that origin revealed that Dean was combative and confrontational.  

One columnist identified with the liberal viewpoint wrote in The New York Times that Dean should become less confrontational and that the impression derived from listening to him was that, should he ever engage George W. Bush in debate, that his first move would be, apropos his wrestling background, to put his Republican opponent in a headlock.

Oddly enough, the bizarre Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who coined such press conference responses as that looting on the streets of Baghdad was no more than a sign of democracy breaking out in Iraq, was a collegiate wrestling champion at Princeton, an Ivy League university no less.  

Had he been a Democrat Rumsfeld would surely have been tagged as an elitist.  Rumsfeld was a wrestler and did not suffer the same stigma as Howard Dean with the media.

There was something about Howard Dean's manner that made him appear angry and combative according to media critics.  Dean took an aggressive stance on the issues and made his case forcefully, but how does this separate him from Richard Nixon in his younger days?  This was before Nixon became president and delegated hard-hitting campaign chores, including dirty tricks, to surrogates such as Charles Colson.  

What was it about Howard Dean that differentiated him from any other determined politician campaigning aggressively on behalf of a cause in which he believed?  The critics never did provide an explanation; they just persisted with the same drone of Dean being combative, overly aggressive, hot-tempered, and un-presidential.

There was a strong correlative reason behind focusing on the personal in seeking to dispose of Howard Dean as a viable presidential candidate.  In the media's steady focus on Dean as a person the emphasis would be shifted away from the issues on which he was running for president.  

In the first place, Dean represented a new kind of candidate with his committed legions of followers and his use of the Internet to generate funds.  Should candidates be able to harness the Internet and link it to shrewd fund raising techniques the corporate elitists and their mobs of lobbyists would lose their monopoly.  

As for Dean and the issues on which he was running, here was a man from a small but progressive Eastern state who challenged the premise on which the Iraq War was being fought.  He correctly saw it as a distraction away from the war on terrorism and repeatedly pointed out that we had gone into Iraq without substantive legal cause.  

Dean further sought to hold politicians accountable who supported the war.  In short, they had made the wrong call and America suffered as a consequence.

Dick Cheney, who continued to receive money from his old company Halliburton, had seen to it that it was provided with a no-bid contract and entrance into Iraq with the taxpayers picking up the tab.  

Multinationals such as Bechtel and Monsanto quickly followed suit.  Could it be that the corporate kingpins seeking to enrich their coffers through rich supplies of Iraq's oil resources felt threatened by a no nonsense candidate with a large and effective grassroots volunteer movement?  

There was another major issue on which Dean possessed solid professional expertise, and it was also destined to send quivers through certain corporate boardrooms.  Howard Dean was a physician and had implemented an effective health care plan for citizens of Vermont.  

Dean initiated the "Dr. Dynasaur" program, which ensured near universal health coverage for children and pregnant women in the state.  The uninsured rate in Vermont dropped from 12.7 to 9.6 percent during his watch.  Child abuse and teen pregnancy rates were cut roughly in half.  

Dean's people-oriented health care approach with a focus on inclusion and cost effectiveness sent nervous shivers through boardrooms of health maintenance organizations.  Would this upstart Vermont governor threaten their domain of ever accelerating riches?  

Under the Cheney-Bush banner things were proceeding their way with a cosmetic form of would be assistance recommended through vouchers to small and selective numbers of people.  Did they want to confront a man who would shake up the system?  How about a national debate between Dr. Dean and Bush on the subject of health care?  Which candidate would be more knowledgeable on the subject?

Another area where Dean was to be feared was in the realm of budgetary effectiveness.  The standard procedure is to tag any putatively effective Democratic candidate as a "tax and spend liberal" and hope that the label sticks.  

Many, even in the progressive ranks, believed that Dean was a social liberal and a fiscal conservative.  Some likened him to former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

While attempting to peg Dean ideologically would make for a lively debate, as Republican strategists and corporate media fellow travelers sought to make him appear irresponsible and outside the American mainstream, one major problem ensued.  

When evaluating Dean's decade as Vermont's head of state with Bush's stewardship in Washington, it soon became apparent as to which individual was frugal and which was an irresponsible free spender.

At a time when Bush sought massive infusions of taxpayer dollars to boost defense spending and for the war in Iraq, he simultaneously sought tax cuts earmarked for the wealthiest segments of society on the unrealized assumption that jobs would be created and the economy stimulated.  

It was the same strategy undertaken by President Ronald Reagan with even more damaging results than the tripling of the national debt that occurred under the former California actor's watch.  

Bush squandered a surplus bequeathed by President Clinton and took the nation on a debtor's roller coaster ride that, some five years into his stewardship, has produced a whopping $8 trillion dollar debt that continues to climb.  This is the most massive debt in the history of the planet.

When Lieutenant Governor Dean took office following the death of then Governor Richard A. Snelling, who suffered a fatal heart attack, he was immediately confronted with an economic recession and a $60 million budget deficit.  While Vermont is the only state not requiring a balanced budget, Dean immediately pushed for one, launching the beginning of a record of restraint.  

During his slightly better than a decade in office the state paid off much of its debt, balanced its budget eleven times, raised its bond rating, and lowered income taxes twice.  Did the Republicans want Bush to take to the airwaves opposite Dean and discuss their economic records?  

As if Rove and the Republican mud machine and their media allies did not have enough to worry about, there was more.  In Houston on November 18, 2003 the surprise frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination delivered his most significant speech.  

It was a speech that sent shock waves through the corporate establishment and demonstrated that Howard Dean was a candidate of the people and a challenge to the special interest brand of politics that thrives with compliant politicians of the stripe of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay.

A dangerous move toward deregulation had resulted in widespread corporate corruption and losses of American jobs.  It had begun under Ronald Reagan, who transported his stewardship in California under the helpful watch of what was termed his "kitchen cabinet" consisting of wealthy country club types, to the national scene.  The Reagan key phrase had been "Get the government off of people's backs."

When the Republicans between the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and George Bush the Elder in 1988 had won five of six presidential contests, a two decade string broken only by the one term served by Jimmy Carter, who himself won by a wafer thin margin over President Gerald Ford, many Democrats adopted the pragmatic position that the party was losing because it was perceived as "too far to the left" for mainstream voters.  

The response to this perception was the birth of the Democratic Leadership Council, which was designed to put a moderate face on party policies.  Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton became a prominent figure in the DLC movement and as an ultimate beneficiary of its support, who achieved the presidency, took certain positions thought to be in the American mainstream.  

One disastrous consequence of this strategy was Clinton's embracing of so-called globalized "free trade" with the consequences of job losses at home and outsourcing abroad.  Another was a continuation of the deregulation policy championed by Ronald Reagan.  

Howard Dean believed that the Democratic Party had moved away from its roots as a champion of the middle class and chose Houston due to the fact that it was the home city of Enron, headed by close Bush friend "Kenny Boy" Lay, which had collapsed in a sea of corruption.  

Enron had left its disastrous mark on its employees, on California with its brazen dollar grab in holding the Golden State hostage in its effort to secure energy, and ultimately on the nation itself.

Citing the Enron tragedy and other corporate tragedies, Dean took a bold forward step in calling for a comprehensive reversal of prevailing policy, a "re-regulation" of American businesses.  This bold and timely populist proposal made the corporate interests and their Republican congressional stamps of the Tom DeLay stripe more determined than ever to finish Dean off before he could establish winning momentum.

Dean's speech took aim at utility companies as well as any business offering stock options.  Also recognizing the right-oriented media monopoly developing from Reagan's ending the equal time provision that had been theretofore enforced by the Federal Communications Commission, Dean stated that he did not rule out re-regulating the telecommunications industry as well.

"At Enron, those at the top enriched themselves by deceiving everyone else and robbing ordinary people of the future they'd earned," Dean said.  "The Bush administration is following their lead."

Dean cited re-regulation as a tangible way to restore trust.  His move marked a clear break from Clinton's "New Democrat" approach of trying to appease both business and workers with what the media termed "centrist" policies.  Earlier in the campaign the Vermont Democrat had reversed his prior support for Clinton's so-called "free trade" agreements with Mexico, Canada and China.

That paragon of Bush Lite media jargon, Howard Kurtz, was horrified by Dean's phraseology.  In a Washington Post rant under the heading of "Dean's Dangerous Word" Kurtz wrote in his column, "Howard Dean needs a better phrase-maker.  He has just declared himself a champion of `re-regulation.'  Not exactly a stirring call to arms."

How touching it is when representatives of the mainstream corporate media demonstrate concern that Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot and making themselves less electable by veering from a norm they establish.  

What Kurtz did not focus on was Dean's statement that deregulation led to excesses such as the California blackouts and economic calamity stemming from the unobstructed field afforded to the predatory antics of Bush friend, Enron's "Kenny Boy" Lay.

Internet progressives hungering for needed political change saw through the Kurtz criticism.  

As Betsy R. Vasquez put it in The Moderate Independent, "The media has grown accustomed to wimpy moderates and left-wingers carefully tiptoeing around ideas and terms that have been made anathema, like 'liberal,' 'regulation, 'increasing taxes on the wealthy,' `put conditions on free trade.'  Al Gore's 2000 campaign was the ultimate pinnacle of this mealy-mouthed cowardice."

Vasquez' words demonstrated that progressives who had become depressed and believed that the political system had passed them by were paying careful heed to Dean's message.

The aroused corporate media realized that it had work to do to kill off Dean's momentum.  The strategy was to circumvent the issues by making Dean appear unstable as well as, and here comes that word again, unelectable.  The effort was intensified as the first test of the campaign season, the Iowa Caucuses, beckoned.