Thinking of donating to Dean?

Help my dog raise $2K for Dean! Just click on the sig!

(Shameless plug, I know, but you get to see Teddy!)

Big doglover here, so I just chipped in. Good luck with your goal.

At the Jefferson Jackson Dinner Howard Dean said "You have the power to take back the Democratic Party!"

Now the Iowa caucus members there are probably thinking: "Take it back from who? Us? Hmmm."

Howard Dean is a wedge candidate, pure and simple. And a little reading on the conservative web sites will show you that, they not only would love to run against Dean, but are giving money to Dean's
campaign. And laughing up their sleeves at the Dems, the whole time for playing into Karl Rove's hands.

the RNC feels they need to put out an ad defending Bush almost 1 year before the election in the two states that hold the earliest primaries, both of which Dean is leading (or close to).

good to have you here

You'd be doing me a big favor.

As for them giving money to Dean, I'm laughing up my sleeves, too.

Republicans for Dean
By DAVID BROOKS

The results of the highly prestigious Poll of the Pollsters are in! I called eight of the best G.O.P. pollsters and strategists and asked them, on a not-for-attribution basis, if they thought Howard Dean would be easier to beat than the other major Democratic presidential candidates. Here, and I'm paraphrasing, are the results:

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

You would have thought I had asked them if Danny DeVito would be easier to beat in a one-on-one basketball game than Shaquille O'Neal. They all thought Dean would be easier to beat, notwithstanding his impressive rise. Some feared John Kerry, others John Edwards, because his personality wears well over time, and others even Bob Graham, because he can carry Florida, more than Dean. As their colleague Bill McInturff put it atop a memo on the Dean surge: "Happy Days Are Here Again (for Republicans)."

I think the pollsters are probably right, but I'd feel a lot more confident if I could find somebody who really understood the forces that are reshaping the American electorate.

Over the past few decades, the electorate has become much better educated. In 1960, only 22 percent of voters had been to college; now more than 52 percent have. As voters become more educated, they are more likely to be ideological and support the party that embraces their ideological label. As a result, the parties have polarized. There used to be many conservatives in the Democratic Party and many liberals in the Republican Party, groups that kept their parties from drifting too far off-center.

Now, there is a Democratic liberal mountain and a Republican conservative mountain. Democrats and Republicans don't just disagree on policies — they don't see the same reality, and they rarely cross over and support individual candidates from the other side. As Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has shown, split-ticket voting has declined steadily.

The question is whether this evolution changes the way we should think about elections. The strategists in the Intensity School say yes. They argue that it no longer makes sense to worry overmuch about the swing voters who supposedly exist in the political center because the electorate's polarization has hollowed out the center. The number of actual swing voters — people who actually switch back and forth between parties — is down to about 7 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the people in this 7 percent group have nothing in common with one another. It doesn't make sense to try to win their support because there is no coherent set of messages that will do it.

Instead, it's better to play to the people on your own mountain and get them so excited they show up at the polls. According to this line of reasoning, Dean, Mr. Intensity, is an ideal Democratic candidate.

The members of the Inclusiveness School disagree. They argue that there still are many truly independent voters, with estimates ranging from 10 to 33 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the Inclusiveness folks continue, true independents do have a coherent approach to politics. Anti-ideological, the true independents do not even listen to candidates who are partisan, strident and negative. They are what the pollster David Winston calls "solutionists"; they respond to upbeat candidates who can deliver concrete benefits: the Family and Medical Leave Act, more cops in their neighborhoods, tax rebate checks.

By this line of thinking, Dean is a terrible candidate. His partisan style drives off the persuadable folks who rarely bother to vote in primaries but who do show up once every four years for general elections.

The weight of the data, it seems to me, supports the Inclusiveness side. And the chief result of polarization is that the Democrats have become detached from antipolitical independent voters. George Bush makes many liberal Democrats froth at the mouth, but he does not have this effect on most independents. Democrats are behaving suicidally by not embracing what you might, even after yesterday's court decision, call the Schwarzenegger Option: supporting a candidate so ideologically amorphous that he can appeal to these swingers.

Which is why so many Republicans are quietly gleeful over Dean's continued momentum. It is only the dark cloud of Wesley Clark, looming on the horizon, that keeps their happiness from being complete.

Oops accidental double click!

Stop the presses! Dean blows up big, thanks to the Internet! It’s a great story, but can Web-based fund-raising really predict the mass market?

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/n_9188/

and this:

DES MOINES, Iowa - Watching a parade last summer, White House political guru Karl Rove grew animated when a group of Howard Dean supporters marched by. "Come on, everybody! Go, Howard Dean!" Rove cheered. "That's the one we want," he was overheard telling a friend.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/7311832.htm

Or need I mention THIS lovely endorsement of Dr. D?


This is the site for Republicans who are interested in the campaign of former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont. Why should Republicans back a Democrat like Dean? Isn't he too far to the Left? Not really. He backs many ideals that we Republicans cherish (or used to cherish) such as fiscal responsibility.

http://republicansfordean.blogspot.com/

I like the "He backs many ideals that we Republicans cherish" part, but to be a good sport I posted it in context! And if you think this makes Dean more electable... Well I've got a bridge for sale that you might be interested in, and can I also suggest this ointment for aching joints?

You fit right in.

:kick: