Funk Babblings

The second of two entries inspired by chronarchy's newfound anti-Republicanism

In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, I supported Howard Dean. One of the reasons I did goes back to a conversation I had with autumnfey a few years ago after she moved to Vermont. She had said that Vermont was deeply divided between the conservative farmers and the liberal hippies. So when Dean came along on the national scene, I figured that anyone who could get re-elected over and over again in a state divided like that had a pretty good chance of winning over people from both sides of a divided electorate nationally. I became more convinced of that the more research I did; in Vermont his critics included people on the left who thought he was too pro-business, and people on the right who thought he was too pro-environment. And even though some of his positions were to the right on mine, they were the kinds of things that would make many on the right take a closer look and possibly support him.

Yet early on, the press branded Dean a liberal. Strange, since most of his positions were to the right of many of his rivals, including John Kerry. This perception of Dean as a wacko liberal seems to have been fed by three factors:

• Many liberals gravitated to his campaign, despite being more idealogically aligned with Dennis Kucinich. Those liberals decided that Kucinich was too far left to be elected, and Dean was far enough to the right of Kucinich that he seemed electable (as I described above). (It also helped that Dean came out early on against Bush's policies, rather than trying to gain the support of people who like Bush's policies.) Since liberals liked Dean, the press concluded that Dean must be a liberal.
  
• He came out against the Iraq war when most of the country was in favor of it, making him *obviously* an antiwar liberal, even though he supported Gulf War I and Afghanistan. (Unlike Kucinich, he was not in favor of just pulling out of Iraq once we went in, but rather wanted to put more troops in, including getting many more countries to help out.)
  
• He was in favor of civil unions for gays, and had signed a first-in-the-country law enacting them in Vermont (after the Vermont Supreme Court said something needed to be done). *Such* a liberal thing to do. (However, unlike Kucinich he was not in favor of gay marriage.) This endeared him to the gay community, which made up a large portion of his early support.
  

(A side effect was that the Kucinich people resented Dean for being considered the liberal candidate when he really wasn't all that liberal.)

That's the way things stood a year ago. My how times have changed. Now more than half the country thinks Iraq just wasn't worth it, and even people on the right are saying we need to get out now. And now with gay marriage happening, more than half the country is in favor of either civil unions for gays or gay marriage; civil unions are on their way to acceptance, and the debate today is about gay marriage. The landscape under Dean has shifted to the left, putting his positions on these two issues slightly on the right of the debate, and Kucinich doesn't look quite as nutty as he used to.


BTW, the gay marriage thing gives me another reason to wonder why so many people like Orson Scott Card so much.