Dr. Dean and the Rebel Gang

I should be a Dean supporter. My demographics are almost right for it. I am young, white, and liberally educated. Many of my old friends are Deaniacs. I went to Phish concerts in college. I could be hanging around Vermont right now, coding with the best of them, dreaming of an internet-politics revolution.

But you see, I've got this 8-month-old son. And I'm the treasurer of my condo association, and I've gotta file some form with the IRS about how we are not a for-profit business, but just three apartments who have to pay a man named Schlomo Pincus to pay a snowplow to plow his parking lot. And my husband just got laid off. And after years of expensive psychiatry, I no longer hate my parents.

So, and there isn't any way to say this without sounding obnoxious and alienating Dean supporters reading this, but I'm a grownup now, and I don't have time for the rebellion that drives the Dean campaign. Dean has admirably mobilized an army of activists of my generation (whatever the marketers are calling us these days). He and his supporters claim that this mobilization is proof enough that he can win the general election. I think they're wrong, in that stubborn wrong-headed way that rebellion always is.

When Dr. Dean shouts "I don't want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore" to a crowd of Californians, he gets roaring applause in response. But when I hear this, I hear a generation of kids with their hands over their ears, screaming "nah nah nah I'm not listening." Dr. Dean wants to take the Democratic party back. Any appeal to the center, his supporters argue, moves us all further to the right, allowing the Republicans to frame the terms of the national debate. In their view, we are in a tug-of-war, red-vs.-blue states, and the only way to win is to pull harder. It's like the Color Wars that so many of us played in camp. Again, I don't think this is a very grownup view of politics, and I don't think it takes the long-term into account.

I'm not going to say Dr. Dean cannot win the general election. If, despite the efforts of the supporters of other candidates, Dr. Dean is the Democratic nominee, I want to be able to give my energies wholeheartedly to his campaign. If I'm sure he can't win, I'll have a hard time doing that.

So: Dr. Dean could win the general election. But it would be chancy, it would be dirty, and it would be close. Very, very close.

I don't want a close election. Dean supporters want to forget the South. Mobilize the base, screw the center, we're sick of being told what to do by the careful grownups running our party. Al Gore, who was a careful grownup and ended up adrift, is having his own personal midlife crisis by supporting the kids.

We can't forget the red states, and the biggest reason is the Senate.
What good will it do to win the White House and lose the Senate so badly that the President can get nothing done?
What good will it do to win the White House and drive the political wedge in deeper, so that the other half of the electorate becomes the angry half, and we lose again in 2008?

I admire the fervor of the Deaniacs, and I hope, whether or not Dr. Dean wins the nomination, they will stay involved with the Democratic party. But Dean himself has said he doesn't think they will:

I mean, we've already got 39,000 people working for us all around the country ... I really do believe--and I think about this--I want to get this nomination, and if I don't ... these kids are not transferrable. I can't just go out and say, "Okay, so I didn't win the nomination, so go ahead and vote for the Democrats." They're not going to suddenly just go away. That's not gonna happen.

For a candidate to say something like that, for this election, an election that is not about Democratics and Republicans but about democracy and authoritarianism, is both childish and dangerous. If Dean wins the nomination, he'll get my money, my efforts, and my vote, but I won't be happy about it.

I'd rather vote for a grownup. I'd rather vote for someone who is running for president because he understands exactly how important this election is. Who entered the race at the urging of others, not for self-aggrandizement. Someone who has a deep knowledge of foreign policy, genuine patriotism, and an expansive view of freedom. I'd rather vote for a man who is not interested in partisan battles, because he recognizes that this election is not about partisanship but about whether our elections continue to count at all. Our current President is an authoritarian father figure, and he has scared the nation into submission with his stories about the big bad wolf just outside our borders. Shall we run a teenager against him, a kid who tells us he doesn't believe in the big bad wolf, it's just a story daddy uses to keep us docile? Or shall we run a man who has faced the wolf down, seen the evil the wolf has done, brought the wolf to justice, and lived to tell the tale?

I'd rather vote for Wesley Clark. And my bet is that there are a lot of other grownups out there who'd rather vote for him too.