A few last thoughts on the South Carolina Democratic Debate: Sharpton is absolutely right to question why for the poor to die for their country abroad is an "honor," but for the rich to pay taxes is a "burden," and to call for a less regressive payroll tax. I'm not sure what Dean was trying to pull off with his critique of Kerry's failed healthcare bills - it felt overly self-conscious and affected, even grasping. Kerry wasn't particularly smooth in responding, but came off better over all in that exchange. I wish I could say that Lieberman's touting welfare reform as the sort of "bipartisan accomplishment" he'd continue lost him my vote, but clearly he never had it in the first place. I do find it sad that the welfare system has been completely off the radar of these debates. I was glad to see Kerry get called on what Brooks called the "inner Moynihan" of some of his '90s rhetoric. He came off quite defensive responding to a statement of his on affirmative action, and preached fealty to the "mend it, don't end it" stance multiple times without allaying any fears about what kind of mending he plans to do.

Dean did an effective job making the case against the PATRIOT Act but framed in terms of stopping future assaults on civil liberties rather than calling to undo the recent ones. Why isn't anyone calling Edwards on his role in drafting it? Glad to see the way the rhetoric within the Democratic party has shifted over the past few years. Part of that, no doubt, is being out of power; part of that is the success of the "anti-globalization" movement in putting the issue, so to speak, on the map. For Dean to say that we've given global rights to corporations but not to workers is right on; to describe that as having done half the job but forgotten the other half smacks of a disingenuous attempt to reconcile his stance with his record. Kucinich laid out the case for single-payer health insurance clearly and sharply (and effectively dismissed the idea that the Clintons had pursued such a plan), and Sharpton made the compelling moral argument for such a system. What's most interesting to me about the other candidates' alternatives is that none of them mounted an argument (true, they're generally not very good ones) against such a system any stronger than Clark's "Let's fix the one we have."

Watching the Democratic Debate now. A couple thoughts so far: Somewhat should ask Joe Lieberman what it means to be "strong on values." Also, what it would mean to be weak on values, which of his competitors are weak on values, and whether the Bush administration could be characterized as "strong on values." Glad to see David Kay's charges getting some play here, given the way they've been underplayed by the media - or arguably overshadowed by the primaries. Dean is right to point the finger at Cheney, and Kerry did a deft job of avoiding either disputing or echoing his charge. I'm not sure what Edwards has in mind when he calls for a comission organized not by Congress but by "us, the people," although I'm all for it. Also, Edwards is in Congress too... Sharpton has joined Kucinich in calling for everyone to stay in for a long race to mobilize all their constituencies. I think there's a strong case for that. Also, he's right to point out that unlike John Edwards' dad, his couldn't have gotten a job as a mill worker.

It's difficult to picture this being a good move for Howard Dean. Joe Trippi, by most accounts, deserves a great deal of the credit for infusing the Dean campaign with an organizing approach that the Democrats have largely forgotten over the past couple decades, and by all accounts was central to Dean's tremendous rise over the past year. Replacing him with a Gore operative, further, risks the appearance or worse the reality of trying to reassure voters by embracing the establishment that's disenfranchised so many of them from the process. When Gore endorsed Dean I argued that it demonstrated more about Gore and his recognition of the failures of his "lockbox" campaign than about Dean; it would be a shame if Dean plans to regain his lead by becoming Al Gore circa 2000. Or, for that matter, John Kerry circa 2003.

This is good news for Kerry, of course, who goes into February 2 two for two. Also for Clark, who seized that third metaphorical ticket out of New Hampshire that pundits at least seem to think is important, and more importantly avoided that fifth-place standing that looked like a real possibility given reports about his machine on the ground. Good news also, I'd argue, for Dean, the only candidate to run in both Iowa and New Hampshire and rank higher this time, and faces two candidates sharing the top three with him in New Hampshire - Kerry and Clark - who are struggling for the same electable-veteran niche.

Nathan Newman offers a good reason to like Kerry. Mickey Kaus offers several reasons not to. As I see it, Kerry's greatest offense of the past months has been telling Eric Alterman in early December Eric, if you truly believe that if I had been President, we would be at war in Iraq right now, then you shouldn’t vote for me and then using the capture of Saddam Hussein to argue Howard Dean was weak for opposing the war.

Timothy Noah argues that Howard Dean has nothing to apologize for. She's right. Well, there's plenty for him to apologize for - but getting worked up isn't it. Was yelling in the way he did a poor tactical move in that it was inevitable to be interpreted by some not as a rallying cry he learned from the Farmworkers but as a the cry of blood-thirsty banshee? Sure. But the odds that you'll turn on TV news and see Howard Dean yelling as supposed to the odds that the 30-second clip will be, say, George Bush flirting in the State of the Union with writing bigotry into the US Constitution are disgraceful. As Garance Franke-Rutka observes: I -- and others -- could scarcely hear what Dean was saying on the stage from the press section in the back of the room because several thousand Deaniacs were making so much noise (Dean wasn't the only one screaming) and the acoustics in the room weren't very good. From inside the room, it seemed that he was feeding off the energy of a crowd that was cheering him on, and that they got louder and louder in concert with each other. There's a great deal going on in this country about which we should be hollering bloody murder right now, and the more time spent fixating on whether getting worked up is "presidential," the farther we are from doing something about it. As Russ Baker writes: Basically, at a pep rally, he yelled like a football coach. This is described as being “unpresidential.” But says who? Besides, what’s the definition of ‘presidential?’ Isn’t giving insulting nicknames to world leaders unpresidential? Isn't sending hundreds of American soldiers to die for uncertain and misrepresented ends in Iraq unpresidential – or worth considering as such? Isn’t having an incredibly poor grasp of essential world facts and an aversion to detail and active decision-making unpresidential?

A couple thoughts about the State of the Union Address: Glad to see so many Democrats clapping when Bush announced that the PATRIOT Act was set to expire next year and before he had called for it to be renewed. Nice to see glimmers of resistance from the Dems - maybe this time they'll vote against the damn thing. Have to say I'm not quite sure what Bush meant by "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" - but I guess that's the idea. Were the Iraqis hosting academic conferences about WMD? If Bush believes that alluding to a constitutional marriage denying homosexual couples the right to marriage without explicitly calling for it with mollify both the "religious right" and the "soccer moms," he's got another think coming. Giving gay couples the same legal protections as heterosexual ones? Not, contrary to conservative dogma, "special rights." Giving religious groups a free pass to ignore anti-discrimination law and still receive federal funding on account of being religious? There are your special rights. Howard Dean's primal scream Monday night I think we can agree didn't make him new friends. But how many people actually found the Daschle-Pelosi fireside chat to be a more effective response to a speech that was a paen to the radical right? The Center for American Progress offers some line-by-line parshanut (commentary).

A couple thoughts on the Iowa caucuses, a topic on which much ink (real and virtual) has and no doubt and will be spilled: As someone who, despite significant reservations, believes Dean would be the best of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, I was disappointed to see him come in third. As someone who believes with great conviction in the organizing model that Dean has employed, I was disappointed to see that it was not enough to win him the Caucus. That does little to take away from the tremendous progress the Dean campaign has made and the ways it which it's destabilized some of the unfortunate Clintonian paradigms of building power in the Democratic party. I'd also argue that losing Iowa does less than many think to hurt Dean's chances of seizing the endorsement. One of the ways the press has hurt Dean over the past months, besides applying a level of cynicism and scrutiny to him denied in coverage of, say, the sitting President, is by raising the bar for his importance impossibly high. It'll be interesting to see whether Dean is as effective as Clinton at seizing on and drawing momentum from underdog status. Some have argued that losing Iowa is better for Dean because it leaves several "anti-Dean" candidates in the running going into New Hampshire and stymies efforts to coalesce behind one Dean alternative - I guess we'll see how that plays out as well. It'll be interesting to see what Kerry makes of the new attention and the new media narrative offered to him. Specifically, I wonder to what he and his staff attribute his late surge. The role he takes over the next weeks may hint at who it is they he thinks is propelling his rebirth as a candidate. Looks like the zenith of Dick Gephardt's political career has passed. The interesting story here may be his failure to marshall stronger support from the labor movement - instead of garnering the endorsement by the AFL-CIO as a body some expected, he saw the two largest unions in the body go to Dean. I think the Cold War AFL-CIO (there's a reason they used to call it the AFL-CIA) model suggested to some by his support for the war in Iraq, and the tension it created, speaks to shifts in the American labor movement.

Has the press treated Dean worse than the rest of the Democratic field? The Center for Media and Public Affairs argues convincingly that it has. Dean, meanwhile, is back in the lead in Iowa polling, albeit a statistically insignificant one. I say he'll win on Monday because his campaign is the one most effectively organizing voters not only to show support but to do the shlepping it takes to caucus.

This issue of In These Times includes compelling pieces by Andy Stern and Gerald McEntee, Presidents of the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the two largest unions in the AFL-CIO. SEIU and AFSCME, the leading private and public sector unions respectively in the US, surprised many pundits who view them as rivals when they together endorsed Howard Dean a few months back. Stern argues rightly that the Democratic party cannot survive without the labor movement: At our best, unions are one of the few institutions with progressive values that have millions of members, multimillion dollar budgets and the ability to do grassroots organizing on a large enough scale to counter the power of today's corporations. The 2000 presidential election clearly showed the difference unions can make. * Bush won in nonunion households by 8 points, but lost in union households by 37 points. * He won nonunion white men by 41 points, but lost union white men by 24 points. * He won nonunion gun owners by 39 points, but lost union gun owners by 21 points. * He did 16 points better among nonunion people of color than among union people of color. So if more workers in Florida, Missouri, Ohio and other states that went narrowly for Bush had been union members, the past three years in this country would have been very different. He offers three priorities for organized labor: legal defense of the right to organize as a human right, alliance across movements and communities in fighting for just causes, and prioritizing organizing. The latter two are arguably what accounted for the historic success of the CIO before and during the New Deal period, and are central to the New Unity Partnership Stern is spearheading with the Presidents of HERE, UNITE, the Laborers, and the Carpenters. The decline in the first, from the Taft-Hartley Act (which only Dennis Kucinich among the Democratic candidates has promised to repeal) to Reagan's crackdown on the Air Traffic Controllers, is at the centerpiece of the counter-revolution against the labor movement over the past decades. And Bush, as McEntee argues, has pushed that counter-revolution further: Indeed, at no other time during my 44 years in labor have I seen members of my union-the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)-nor the House of Labor, more dedicated to getting one person out of office. And we all know why. Three million jobs lost in three years-the most since the Great Depression: 66 million Americans with inadequate healthcare coverage or no healthcare coverage at all; a median household income that has fallen for three straight years; 3 million Americans who slipped into poverty in 2001; ergonomic rules scrapped; overtime regulations attacked. The list goes on and on...the Bush administration invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act-an action that hadn't been taken in 25 years and never in a lockout. President Bush's shameful use of Taft-Hartley sent a message to other employers: When the going gets rough at the bargaining table, the federal government can always step in-to help the boss. But McEntee's central argument, which Stern alludes to as well, is that getting a Democratic President into office is not and never has been enough to protect the rights of working people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed a National Labor Relations Act to bring labor into his coalition and into the Democratic establishment becuase it was clear that otherwise the labor movement could have torn his Presidency apart. Real economic change in this country won't be accomplished by a Clintonite who sees organized labor as a special interest equivalent to big business to be kept at bay with moderate reforms and kept out of corrupting the political process. As McEntee argues: It is clear that we must defeat George W. Bush. But we must also grow our unions. And whomever the Democratic Party selects as its nominee-AFSCME hopes it is Howard Dean-we must insist that he support a comprehensive social justice agenda, job creation, quality and affordable healthcare for all, the preservation of Medicare and Social Security, civil rights and much more. And the House of Labor must insist that the next president support an aggressive agenda for worker rights, including real penalties for violators of labor laws, creating a law that will make employers recognize their workers' desire to form a union, establishing first contract arbitration and giving the National Labor Relations Board the power to enforce laws that protect workers.

This is nice news for the Dean campaign; this is very, very good news for it. It'll be interesting to see what those who saw Mosely-Braun as a DLC puppet running to draw Black votes away from Sharpton will make of her endorsement of the man who calls them the "Republican wing of the Democratic party." Although, come to think of it, this year's primary schedule was also supposed to help assure the ascendence of a candidate approved by the Democratic establishment, and look how that worked out.

As DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton recently observed: Not content with denying D.C. residents congressional voting rights, Congress has gone out of its way to silence us by placing a rider in the D.C. appropriation that keeps residents from lobbying Congress or country for their rights," she wrote. This insult added to injury should be enough to send residents to the polls to vote on Tuesday in a primary whose purpose is to tell the country what most Americans do not know, according to opinion polls: that Congress denies voting rights to the citizens of its own capital. The New York Times is more dismissive of the primary: This is, alas, a nonbinding beauty contest. But it relates the case for representation in simple and inarguable terms: While Wyoming, population 494,000, has one representative and two senators, Washington, population 571,000, has none. One wonders whether those half a million people would have gone without a vote for so many years if more of them were White. FirstPrimaryBlog has the latest on tomorrow's primary, including guest statements from Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton in support of, respectively, statehood, congressional representation, and one or the other. Five of the candidates - including Lieberman - made the shameful decision to withdraw from D.C.'s primary, leaving Dean, Sharpton, Kucinich, and Mosely-Braun. My prediction is Dean comes in first, Sharpton second.

Howard Dean gets it right: From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people...My view of Christianity . . . is that the hallmark of being a Christian is to reach out to people who have been left behind. So I think there was a religious aspect to my decision to support civil unions. I can't help wondering however, why Howard Dean's God stops short of full civil marriage...

As Atrios points out, Bush made much the same argument Dean got in such trouble for about leaving it to the judges to render verdicts against the evildoers - and not a peep of outrage from the "liberal media."

Right now C-SPAN is replaying a National Chamber Foundation conference at which Newt Gingrich was invited to represent the Republicans and the Democrats were represented by - you guessed it - the DLC's Al From. It's a pretty painful exhibition of the two of them gloating about how much they have in common. True, insofar as Newt Gingrich's Republicans represent the direction in which Al From would like to shepard the Democrats (his top three under-discussed goals for the Democratic party: eviscerating labor and environmental protections in trade agreements, scaling back the New Deal, and co-operating better with Republicans)...The most ridiculous moment however, would have to be From's argument that they're parallel figures in that Newt discovered a "New Republican" movement, and he discovered a "New Democrat" one. The difference, of course, is that Newt's Republicans made a resounding victory in '94 by mobilizing their base and Al's Democrats inspired a new verb - "Sister Souljah" - for what they did to their base and bequeathed a statistical tie in 2000. Newt Gingrich has much more in common with Howard Dean than with Al From - which may be why he used his podium to lavish praise on From and castigate Dean, and may also be why Dean is so much more popular than From these days (for more on Newt as organizer, check out David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf's book)

Bill Bradley today became the latest high-profile Democrat to endorse Howard Dean. The prospect of Bradley and Gore, who fought a bitter primary struggle four years ago, coming together to endorse a candidate in this one is a peculiar and interesting one. I think, as I suggested before, that it shows less about Bradley than it does about Gore - who was castigated in 2000 for failing to run the kind of aggressive populist campaign Bradley and now Dean is associated with.

One of the more interesting moments I caught in the Iowa Debate was the Kucinich-Dean exchange on single-payer universal healthcare. Dean, to his credit, was up front in stating that voters whose primary issue was single-payer should vote for Kucinich, and then touted the virtues of his plan which, Kucinich rightly argued, would maintain the strangehold of the insurance industry on the practice and policy of healthcare. What perhaps was most surprising about Dean's defense of his plan, however, was its central argument that it was simply the best the Democrats could get away with - that his plan "was written to pass Congress." Dean cited the failures of the Carter and Clinton healthcare plans to buttress his claim. I think Michael Tomasky, in Left for Dead, offers a more convincing reading of the Clinton healthcare failure: ...the A.M.A. and the insurance lobbies fought the Clinton proposal with the same intensity they'd have have brought to a fight against single-payer. A political calculation to trim the sails is useful and defensible if, without sacrificing too much in the way of principle, it gets you more votes. The Clinton calculation did not do that. And in this instance, given the number of co-sponsors single-payeralready had in the House of Representatives and the appeal of the plan's salient features, it may actually have been the case that a single-payer system could have been sold to the public. The seller, though, had to be willing to confront one of Washington's most powerful lobbies - something the Clintons weren't up to; but this, too, is something people clearly say they want their leaders to do more of. Among the people calling on their leaders to do more of that? Howard Dean. Kucinich was right to ask him who, if not the President of the United States, would be in a position to stand up to the insurance industry. Dean, unfortunately for those of us drawn by the strength of his organizing and the clarity of his alternative vision, was left looking not for the first time like what he's referred to rightly as "the Republican wing of the Democratic party."

Apologies to the net-surfers (or maybe it was one person twice...) who happened upon this site looking for a "Howard Dean - Ann Coulter Porno" or secrets about "John Kerry" and "bisexuality." All I can say is, there's some truth to the argument that Dean was in bed with Gingrich in the mid-'90s, but this is a little extreme. And as to Kerry - would that he were, and his implosion in the Democratic primary could at least be remembered as a stand for something...

For those who think this site has gone too easy on Howard Dean, this article fairly and comprehensively sets forth the episodes in Dean's record which should leave progressives concerned: Dean slashed millions of dollars from all sorts of social programs, from prescription drug benefits for Medicare recipients and heating assistance for poorer Vermonters to housing assistance funds. In defending his cuts to social programs, Dean said, "I don’t think I have to shy away from that just because I’m supposed to be a liberal Democrat." Throughout the 1990s, Dean’s cuts in state aid to education ($6 million), retirement funds for teachers and state employees ($7 million), health care ($4 million), welfare programs earmarked for the aged, blind and disabled ($2 million), Medicaid benefits ($1.2 million) and more, amounted to roughly $30 million. Dean claimed that the cuts were necessary because the state had no money and was burdened by a $60 million deficit. But during the same period, Dean found $7 million for a low-interest loan program for businesses, $30 million for a new prison in Springfield, VT, and he cut the income tax by 8 percent (equivalent to $30 million)–a move many in the legislature balked at because they didn’t feel comfortable "cutting taxes in a way that benefits the wealthiest taxpayers." By 2002, state investments in prisons increased by nearly 150 percent while investments in state colleges increased by only 7 percent Rosenthal takes particular pride in culling that Dean admits that he recognized early on that the popular anger at Bush is "a raw energy, an energy that I know could be channeled." His suggestion is that this shows that Dean is someone who is sure to repay our support by cutting our living standards and promoting American power abroad... Alternatively, it could show exactly why Howard Dean might just not. Acknowledging that Howard Dean the candidate is descended more from the popular response to George Bush than from the record of Howard Dean - that he is, like any candidate, a vessel for the forces which have lifted him above the surface - should lead to more soul-searching among progressives than the conclusion either that therefore he'll be loyal or that therefore he'll abandon it.