I have to admit, if I were a Democrat and I woke up this morning to discover that a sitting Democratic Senator had written an article for the Wall Street Journal that had the title Memo To Terry McAwful (registration required, but free), I’d be pretty pissed off, too. Miller’s retiring, sure, but that’s still just plain rude (not exactly dignified, either) – especially when the article’s supposedly trying to give advice to Miller’s nominal party. I suspect that it’s going to become a good deal more nominal, assuming that it hasn’t hit negative numbers yet.
Which is a shame, because there was something very interesting (and not particularly offensive) about one of his comments about Dean.
(3) Howard Dean is a hard man to feel sorry for, he’s just so cocky. But I’m feeling bad for him. He’s worked hard to get where he is, including finding an honorable way to raise a lot of money. But there hasn’t been a leader since Julius Caesar who’s had more conspirators pretending to be his friend–but really wanting him dead–than suddenly Howard Dean has today. They want his Internet contributor list. They want his energy and spontaneity. They want his secret for tapping the young antiwar crowd. So they’ll endorse him, pat him on the back with a few “atta boys,” and secretly hope he loses.
Now, I happen to agree that Dean’s cocky – I note that others will disagree with me on that, but leave it to one side for this discussion. The part that struck me was the “honorable way to raise a lot of money” bit: quibbles aside, this is true. Despite whatever else you might think of the man, the technical details of Dean’s 2004 election campaign are going to be required reading for political managers: they’re doing legitimately groundbreaking and innovative work with online communities, work that will be standard by 2008 and venerable by 2012. It’s not often that you get to see genuinely cutting edge work in political engineering, so keep your eye on it.
You better do it while you can, in fact, because the rest of that paragraph is true, too. This is going to be a brutal primary season for the Democrats, and the knives are already out.
Moe
Terry McAwful? Has Macallan been brainwashing Zell? 😉
I don’t subscribe to the Journal, so I can’t comment further. Obviously I think the Dean campaign is doing some cool process things, that are good for both the Democratic party and the U.S. political system as a whole. It’d be a real pity if a Dean loss–in the primary or the general election–prevented the Democrats from realizing it. The Republicans will catch on too, of course, but we can compete better in Dean’s sources of strength than we can for big donors and TV ads.
Joe Trippi for DNC president. Unless he screws up real bad in the next few months, but I don’t see it.
supposedly trying to give advice
That, friends, is why I never bother reading anything in the WSJ that contains the word “Democrat.” It’s a lot like Peggy Noonan’s “advice” columns – it’s mainly done to pat readers on the back for not being Democrats.
just plain rude
Here you see why I like John Breaux and Evan Bayh but have no patience for Zell Miller. He’s made himself into the human equivalent of one of those backhanded “advice to the Democrats” columns.
I think it’s a saving grace that he does all this as he’s retiring – at least he’s not using it solely to advance his career.
That there paragraph, though, yes on all counts – yes people like Dean more for what he has than what he is, yes to the fact that he’s done amazing things with the process. I think the two are inseparable – more than anything strictly political about him (although he and I have much in common there), I admire his tactics, which have their own special ideological content of which I thoroughly approve, and a self-perpetuating, momentum-building quality that our party has been sorely lacking – and these factors are exactly why I think it doesn’t matter that maybe a handful of Democratic officials “secretly hope he loses.”
Interesting point: the things many people claim not to like about Dean – his penchant for saying dumb things, his determination to manage everything his way, his inability to admit when he’s wrong – are exactly the things that some of these same people claim to like about Bush.
However, I do agree with Miller on one other point: Terry McAuliffe is exactly what’s wrong with the party.
Seth–To be fair, I see those complaints about Dean coming from a lot of Clark supporters who hate Bush a lot more than Dean. (The Dean-o-phobe log, for instance, is run by Jonathan Chait, who wrote a famous Bush-hating article–don’t know if he supports Clark, or if TNR lets its employees support any actually existing Democrat.)