Dean for chair

It is said that it is always darkest before the dawn. Perhaps this will be even more so should the dems select Howard (Dr. Demento) Dean as the next party chair. Once the dem party is moved even further to the left and becomes even a more minority party, maybe the moderates in the party will finally be able to take control. - Sailor

Dean for chair


By Martin L. Gross


The Democratic Party now faces a vital postelection decision — whether to elect Howard Dean on Feb. 12 as its next national chairman.
The most recent folly of the Democrats was to nominate leftist John Kerry as their presidential candidate. The senator was not only outspoken against the war in Iraq, but refused to allocate money for the troops while voting against virtually every arms program designed to defend America.
Now the Democrats are involved in still another folly, the probable election of their most visible and histrionic leftist, Howard Dean, to lead the party. Democratic National Committee members should, by all means, be encouraged to support him and thus continue their policy of political suicide.







This continued pull to the far left, the same defeatist policy that has made them a political minority in the Congress, now includes discussion about possible Democratic candidates for president in 2008. The three names most mentioned include Al Gore, a political has-been who has become a naysayer of enormous proportions, John Kerry, who lost the 2004 election by more than 3 million voters, and the newest potential presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Hillary, who has had a sudden metamorphosis as a middle-American, is fooling no one. She remains the most popular candidate among Democrats but invites the same visceral dislike as Howard Dean among the general population. Potentially, she could lose all 50 states in a general election, salvaging only the District of Columbia. Of course, she might take one state, tying the loosing record of the legendary leftist, George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate who was trounced in l972, beginning the party's major drift toward isolationism and radicalism, two programs designed to make America fail and weaken it in the world.
But that election folly is still four years away. Now the Democratic Party faces an immediate suicide attempt — the possible election of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as chairman. Mr. Dean seems to be the leading candidate for the slot. Let us hope so. It solidifies the reality that Democrats, once the great party of the people, has deteriorated into an alienated minority with no vision of America's greatness and its desire for ever-increasing wealth and security for all its people.
The party has moved so far left, and has become so isolationist with so little support for the successful age-old American foreign policy that has freed more than half the world, that the British Labor Party, once the champion of socialism, is now to the right of our Democrats.
As for Mr. Dean, he is so identified with the lunatic left that just the sight of his face conjures up an image of defeat for the party, as a prisoner of its radical wing. The Democrats are destined to remain a minority unless they break forcefully with their left, which is now correctly identified as an anti-American, anti-wealth cabal with no legitimacy among the growing middle class.
Mr. Dean, Mr. Gore, Mr. Kerry, Mrs. Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, et al., are constantly referred to "liberals." That false euphemism protects them from the scorn they deserve as "leftists." True patriotic liberals such as Franklin Roosevelt Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, were they alive, would shy from these leftists and surely desert the present Democratic Party.
The disgrace of the madly partisan Democrats was vividly demonstrated recently when three-dozen leftist members of the House, along with Sen. Boxer of California, refused to certify the result of the Electoral College, a political rascality that hasn't been tried in 127 years.
America needs two patriotic parties. Now it has one.
By all means elect Howard Dean to lead the Democrats into continued oblivion. Some day, probably soon, they will implode, forcing a realignment of the party back to its historic roots of Jefferson, Jackson and FDR.

Martin L. Gross, author of three New York Times best-sellers on government, is a former Democratic Party official.