Yesterday I renamed my Nepal blog, now it is called Democracy For Nepal, DFN. DFNYC has been my homebase since my move to New York City. And this renaming has been inspired by my association with DFNYC.
My involvement with the movement in Nepal is easily the most important political work I ever did. I am doing it for emotional reasons, but it curiously also has global ramifications. I think it has major ramifications for US politics also.
When Howard Dean ran for DNC Chair, he said he has no plans to run for president again in 2008. And ever since then I have figured the 2004 candidacy was his last one. But then I revisited my impression yesterday after I renamed this blog. Democracy For America. Democracy For New York City. Democracy For Nepal. It started gelling for me.
When Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1990 in Arkansas, he pledged he will complete his four-year term. A year later he went on a listening tour across the state to seek permission from his voters to run for president and he declared he heard the people were okay with the idea.
I guess Howard Dean could go on a similar listening tour across the country in early 2007. And he could change his mind, and he could run.
Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976 and lost early and bad. We all know what happened four and eight years later.
Should Dean decide to run, I am not even looking at anyone else. It might be a Dean-Kerry-Edwards tussle all over again. I keep thinking Hillary has no intention to run. She thinks this is a sexist country, and it is not ready for her. That is just my reading of the situation. I think Bill Clinton's unyielding enthusiasm on a potential Hillary candidacy is partly his apology on the Monica matter. When Hillary wrote her autobiography, she said in there that she had forgiven Bill Clinton, but it was so obvious to me when I read that book that she was still hurt.
That is a second dimension to the Monica story that perhaps only women truly understand. The first I mentioned was my first thought, and lasting thought, that Bill Clinton got sick and tired of Ken Starr hounding his wife and Monica happened. That is the ethnic minority reachout to the underdog fighter. I guess. I never hid the disclaimer, that I am a huge Bill Clinton fan.
There is a third dimension to the Monica thing. An individual is an organism. A unit. Crowds are also organisms, the social scientist in me sees that quite plainly. That crowd as an organism has sex and money thoughts just like individual human beings. Monica is sex, Whitewater is money. Progressive, activist kind of politicians like Bill Clinton was tend to become vocabulary. They help break social barriers, and they make the crowd think more of the sex thoughts, because, if you think about it, all those ethnic and cultural boundaries are sexual. If people were to freely inter-marry, we would not be able to categorize people along ethnic and cultural lines.
And so Bill Clinton is just vocabulary for the crowd as an organism through which the crowd thought sex thoughts. The crowd was basically consuming porn.
Why do I mention these in the case of Howard Dean? First, he might run again. If he runs and wins, he will be a progressive-activist kind. He will also fist into the beehive with abandon. I don't expect to hear Monica and Whitewater in Dean's case. But I do expect him to arouse intense emotions among the status quoists, and the special interests, and the social conservatives, and the rich who are not self-made rich, but were born so and whose idea of entrepreneurship is tax cuts. Why do I say so? Because I have seen so. They will come after Dean again if given a chance.
Those of us like me who never left Dean need to think through things. And it is never too early.
One is Judy Dean. I have seen her on TV a few times, and she comes across as simply adorable. That word was coined for her. She comes across as so genuine. She does not come across as prepared and polished.
Maybe she is a post-feminist working woman who likes her work so much, and whose husband is so open-minded, he is just fine she is not on the campaign trail and instead is tending to her patients. Or maybe she is a loving wife who does not want her Jewish background to become an issue for Howard in the wrong parts of the country. I don't know. Frankly, I don't even want to know. It is husband-wife stuff, private stuff. The voters should be concerned with Dean's policy prescriptions and his leadership style and his political track record.
But I am personally too aware of these undercurrents. I went to a school in Kentucky where the question "Are you Christian or are you Catholic?" was mainstream. And Joe Lieberman in 2004 painfully kept trying to push his first name and at some level it felt like he was trying to get attention away from his last name. And the biggest proof: when the Dean tire hit the road, there already were organized groups in the red meat states who had started talking about Howard Dean's Jewish wife. There was a building momentum. Dean had to be stopped.
Appeasing the racists, the xenophobes, the bigots works as well as appeasing Hitler worked back then. And let's face it, Hitler and those groups do share ideology. If we are serious about a Dean candidacy, we are going to have to confront this issue head on. I wish this were not so, but it is. Dean's candidacy will be a progressive one. And the social progress aspects are the trickiest. But they have to be faced.
If we raise 40 million dollars, we should be willing to spend about 2-5 million dollars of that money to sue such organized groups into bankruptcy, to find the list of names of officers of all those groups to show up in their towns to run stories and ads on their lousy childhoods in their local papers and on their local TV, so as to give them some taste of the politics of personal destruction. Politics is a contact sport. Those who stay above the fray lose. Unilateral disarmament is bad politics.
I have a Southern strategy. It is called conquer the South.
Identity politics is fundamental. The Bush machine ended McCain's hopes of becoming president by running ads that claimed he had a black child. In South Carolina. I guess the McCains have adopted a child from Bangladesh. If you think about it, I grew next door to Bangladesh. Don't tell me Bush is a nice guy.
It happened to Hillary. She was attacked non-stop. When was the last time a Republican's wife got attacked that way or ever? Leaders who will vouch for us, we need to vouch for. Often all it takes is standing up and speaking up. Should we go after Republican wives for standing by men who are anti-choice? Like Newt Gingrich told Bob Reich at the time, "Mr. Secretary, we like your president, but his wife should not be making policy." The issue was not health care, the issue was Hillary.
These people who attack leading Democrat families with their perfected art of the politics of personal destruction then turn around and claim they are for "family values." These people who attack other religions habitually present themselves as pro-faith. And that also affects me personally. I am a Buddhist. In the 1996 election cycle, the Republican machine demonized some Buddhist monks from California who might have donated some money to the Democrats. In the red meat country, it was material enough to put the Democrats in the same basket as the Buddhist monks. That insinuation was dirty picture enough.
These so-called Christians are like Communists: they are so unflinchingly dogmatic.
I mean, I absolutely, totally despise Jesse Helms. That redneck made a career out of demonizing the Third World. I intend to make a semi career out of taking offense on behalf of the Global South. I know 10 years from now I still will not have one good word to say about Jesse Helms.
Identity politics matter. And we need to practice and perfect the art of naming and shaming. As Eminem says,"If I am wrong enough to think it, I am wrong enough to say it." If my political enemies are wrong enough to say and do wrong, I should at least be wrong enough to point it out, and preferably wrong enough to hit back.
In politics those who treat enemies and opponents the same do not go far. Opponents can be respected in both victory and defeat. Enemies are a different category.
I mentioned Hillary. There is another thing. Looks like every Jesus ends up with his Judas, someone in your inner circle, or a few people in your inner circles who end up really hurting you. It is almost statistical. George Stephanopoulos got the Whitewater ball rolling, and was the first to use the "I" word. Whitewater begot Monica begot Al Gore going more after Bill Clinton than after boy George.
Howard Dean had his Judas or a few of them in 2004. I don't know those inner circle names and characters at all well enough. But a few people might have played foul. A campaign that raised 46 million should not have run out of money in New Hampshire. Makes no sense.
So watch out for Judas. And protect Judy.
Then we will have the luxury of countering old media with new media.
Raise a lot of money, but spend little or no money until two months before the first primary. The money goes to the bank and stays there. Before that, do take Dean all over the country, and cover all events in full through text and photo and video blogging. Be our own media. If he appears some place for an hour, put the entire hour in video online. And use old media for free air time, for free press coverage.
Tell the Dean story. We need biographical details. We need people who know him talking about him. He has to show like the guy next door that he is. We don't need to package him, but we do need to present him like he is.
Tackle the media. Tackle the money.
Then you get to do the juicy stuff, the real stuff. The politics and the policy, especially policy. It is not too early to start work on a vision. We need to sculpt the platform. The platform should be one word - progressive - and a phrase - People Power - and also a book, like Bill Clinton's Putting People First in 1992.
Just my early thoughts. And I really would like to contribute to shaping the platform.
