Howard Dean for President :: Politics Political Essays

Howard Dean for President As more and more polls and data seem to indicate the Howard Dean will be the Democratic nominee for president next year (barring a last minute entry by Hillary Clinton) more and more pundits are pulling out their history books to find comparisons to the front-runner. Most point to Dean as an old-school liberal, in the vain of men such as George McGovern, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. An advocate of increased taxes and bigger government, one can find his photo in the dictionary under â€Å"tax and spend liberal†. But while Dean is a member of the Old Left, his entrance in the 2004 presidential election bears stronger to the rise of Barry Goldwater than Michael Dukakis. Dean has been catapulted onto the scene through the efforts of the hard left, anti-war, Bush-hating liberal Democrats which turned out for him in an early summer Internet primary, and won it for him. In 1964, conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was given the Republican nod for president through the intensive efforts of right-wing grassroots groups like the Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom. Like Dean, his critics charged that he was â€Å"unelectable† for his extreme views, and they were proven right when Lyndon Johnson trounced him in the greatest landslide ever. The lesson to be learned from all this is not that the Bush/Rove team can let down their guard in 2004, but that Republicans need to realize, when Dean loses, that it is not the end of the fight. After the 1964 election most pundits declared that extremism was dead, and that all presidential elections would be fought between two moderates. Yet in 1980, Ronald Reagan swept into office on an equally conservative platform. How’d he do it? By using the grassroots forces left in place by Goldwater while presenting himself as a less acidic candidate who would invigorate a stagnant American dream. In 2008 Hillary Clinton will attempt to repeat the success of Ronald Reagan by using the grassroots left behind by Howard Dean while de-emphasizing her own Bush-hating.