Tuesday, January 20, 2004

The morning after

Lots of different thoughts have gone through my head in the last few hours. Some good. Some bad. Some happy. Some sad. I don't think I could hope to put them all down on this blog. But let me just add an amen to this comment from Hesiod:

Fight the good fight. I still think Dean can win this thing.

But I am not so emotionally committed to one candidate over another that I am going to adopt a defeatist and negative attitude. I WANT TO WIN!

All of our top candidates can beat Bush. All of them will take the fight to Bush and refuse to let him get away with the stuff he pulled over the past four years.

So, instead of being upset...you should all be happy! The Republicans know they are in trouble. So let's not bail them out and make our defeatism into a self-fulfilling prophecy!

This goes for all those supporters of other candidates too. You are not getting off the hook here.

I'm trying to ignore both the whining by some Dean supporters and the triumphalism by those who have been railing against him for months. This has never been just about Dean.

I supported Dean from the beginning because he was saying something that needed to be said and that needed to get a wider audience. The Democrats were shell-shocked after 2002 and allowed themselves to get rolled on the war on Iraq and Yet Another Bush Tax Cut. They needed someone to stand up, yell "What I Want To Know..." and slap them out of their stupor.

On that measure alone I would consider my support for Dean to be a success.

Yes, it could be argued that Clark, Kerry and Edwards are just Dean-Lite candidates. It could be argued that they are just repeating Dean's lines but don't really mean it. But then that's where we come in. We are the ones who will have to hold them to what they say (yes, even Dean can't be ultimately trusted to just keep his word).

So the last thing we need is for the Dean Corps to fall apart. We are in the process of rebuilding a party that is in a shambles and it will not be done within the cycle of a single election. We may be able to beat Bush this year. But defeating the apparatus that raised him to the White House will take a lot longer.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home