about his political leanings. Far from being a progressive, or even a centrist, Deans actual record as Governor has had many political scientists describe Dean as a "Rockerfelar REpublican". Denas campign largely garnered support among people who were justas ignorant of his actual political leanings ,or in fact, like the supporters of George Bush, refused to accept that their chosen candidate was anything but progressive or liberal, and in fact was much farther to the right than any of the membes of thr DLC that he criticized. Dean's ability to tap into a group that would sinply follow him based on what he said, without paying attention to the actualstances he had taken repetatively over his entire political career. Starting in 1986 Dean voiced opposition to any legislation that would directly deal with making the statement that gays were entitled to the same civil rights as any other citizen. He opposed this stating that such sconsiderations were already supported by eexistant civil rights laws. Dean's focus on fiscal conservatism was the fiscal conservatism of a true conservative.When it came to balancing the budget, Deans methodology was to continually cut social programs that served the elderly and the disabled. He has a history of this. His health program for chuildren has had mixed reviews, with many pointing out the his programs would eventually need to be cut further and further because he never set up a method of paying for the programs. His behavior as Governor of Vermont was diametrically opposed to his campaign platform. While sating he wanted to repeal ALL of BUsh's tax cuts including those to the middle class, on of Dean's last acts as Governor was to oppose raising taxes on the rich. claiming that the rich were alrady taxesd too highly in Vermont. This is in keeping with his ideas for repealing the Bush plan, as Dean intended to remove tax cuts to the middle class, as well as the rich. Very similar to his ideas for property taxes inVermont. His idea for Vermont property taxes was to tax the rich, the poor, and the middle class at the same rates. This type of tax places more of a burden on the poor and middle class, and favors the wealthy. Fortunately the liberal Vermont Supreme Court declared Deans preferred taxation as unconstitutional, and the legislature then had to move to a progressive, tiered property tax system that made the rich pay higer taxes.
Overall, Howard Dean, Presidential candidate, was a fictional character created for the campaign. In reality., Dean played this chameleonlike game as governor. Members of the Vermont Sierra Club pointed out that Dean always talked to people in such a way that they would be led to beleive that he was on their side, and supported their ideas, but when it finally came down to recommending legislation he always came down on the side or large croporate interests.
His supporters must make up ' dirty tricks tactics, to explain his massive loss of Iowa, but many Iowans have ponted out other reasons. His supporters are among one of the major causes of Deans losses. Many articles and blog entereis from Iowans indicate that Deans supporters were found to be annoying and abusive. One of the last recommendations made to Dean on the night of the Iowa caucuses on the local coverage from Iowa on C-Span was thatn Dean needed to get some control of his supporterds and get them to stop annoying other voters.
A few such observations are here:
And this is that it *wasn't people's neighbors* ringing their doorbell and asking them to vote Dean. It wasn't people who resembled the potential voters in broad demographic or psychographic outline. It was a cadre of out-of-staters who went so far as to visibly brand themselves out-of-staters with the orange hats - dumb, dumb move.
Nobody likes to be told how to think, least of all by self-appointed, parachuted-in vanguardists. Where the Dean Internet campaign "didn't scale," I tend to think it was in the opposite sense than the one in which we generally use this phrase. It scaled up just fine, which is what fooled all of us (and much of the national media). It simply didn't scale *down*, to neighborhoods and districts and precincts and wards, where it might have motivated people if it had ever once touched a chord of commonality or shared experience.
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/26/is_social_software_bad_for_the_dean_campaign.phpOn my campus, reports I heard from attendees of the Democratic caucus were of remarkably underwhelming Dean support. Makes me wonder - who are the people supporting him?
And yes, the Dean people were highly annoying - with a recorded message calling my dorm phone telling me about a rally. Like I'm really going to go to something a computer woke me up to tell me about (and I did have to crawl out of bed to answer the phone when said "message" was delivered). Not to mention the constant deluge of paper down the hallways and slipped under doors for Dean (and Kerry, and Edwards).
********************************************************************
The postmortem of the Iowa caucuses suggests that a few things may have changed in American politics. Unions didn't matter. (The candidate with the biggest number of unions endorsing him was Dick Gephardt, whose fourth-place showing eliminated him from the race. The candidate with the second biggest union support was Howard Dean, who came in third.) Lots of idealistic young people campaigning for you didn't matter. (Those from out of state can't vote and older voters can find them annoying, so his legions of college kids didn't do Dean much good.) Polls didn't matter, much. (Though polls detected the surge of John Kerry and John Edwards and that Dean was slipping, they missed the magnitude of the change and that Edwards actually passed Dean by a big margin. Polls will not tell you who actually votes or goes to a caucus.) Predictions didn't matter. (Early anointing of front runners and before-the-fact analysis neglects the way more and more voters now make up their minds at the last minute.)
http://www.worldmagblog.com/blog/archives/000677.htmlLots more like that from Iowa, and other places. Given this, Dean''s campaign style and the nature of the support he engenders, is not something that the Democratic Party needs. Alienating nad annoying voters is something that could well cost Democrats voters, and in fact, I would not doubt that it may have playted a factor in driving some independents away from voting Democratic in the general election.