January 06, 2004
What the Dean Team is Building
Guest Post by my friend, Bill Roth. I was unable to attend his Dean house party because I was out of town, but the turnout at Bill's house exceeded his expectations. Lovely.
And welcome, Bill, to Pacific Views. After this post, I'm giving Bill keys to our blog and encouraging him to provide us some more of his viewpoints.
Anytime you air an opinion in public, someone will disagree. Anytime you air a strong opinion, someone will get angry. This is a fact of life one has to be prepared for. It's a lesson I try and teach my daughters. In order to air public opinions, you have to have strength of character to deal with this fact. The Italians call this "Mutande di Ghiza". Interestingly, this translates directly to "cast-iron underwear.";
It is possible to assess the quality of the opinion by those who disagree and get angry. I had an experience this week which tells me that my support of Howard Dean is well placed.
On December 30th, the Dean campaign was organizing a series of house parties across the country and I agreed to host one. I was in line at the Safeway buying some last minute items for the party. The woman at the register asked if I was buying supplies for my New Year's Eve party. I mentioned that I was actually preparing for a Howard Dean house party. I could see by the blank stare that she had no idea who Gov. Dean was, so I told her, briefly, what he was running for and what he stood for. She nodded politely. I suggested she should look into his positions and campaign more closely.
Now, I live in San Jose, which is a pretty Democratic town. We have a democratic mayor, 2 democratic members of congress and 8 or 9 of the 10 members of the city council are also follow the party of Jefferson and Jackson.
But I live in the Almaden Valley neighborhood, which is where all the Republicans live.
It was at this point where the woman behind me in line, of the rock-ribbed variety, began strenuously interjecting. "Don't you vote for him!" she said to the woman at the register. She shook her finger and said it again. "He's bad. He's bad." She muttered, and then made a motion as if to shoo me out of line.
It was at this point that I realized that what we are doing with the Dean movement was right.
It is still very early in the presidential election process. Howard Dean may not get the Democratic nomination. But this is almost beside the point. What Gov. Dean is doing, and what those of us who support him are doing, is changing the nature and tenor of the issues that are debated. Furthermore, the Dean movement (it is a movement, after all) is bringing a whole raft of new people into the process. This movement is revitalizing the Democratic Party. We may not win this one, but we're building a base for success in the future.
The American political process is a dialectic, an argument. Passionate discussion of these issues is why we have the electoral process. Elections are how we resolve disputes. We have an enormous fiscal crisis. There are very serious issues at play in our country today. Citizens can now be held incommunicado and without representative for long period of time. 9 million children in this country do not have health care. Wars are being fought and lives are being lost for causes based on false justifications. These issues must be dealt with. The 2004 election is the means to do this.
The electoral arguments will be spirited, to say the least. Given the nature of American political discourse lately, they are most likely to be nasty, loud, brutish, personal and filled with invective. But we must engage in them with mutande di ghiza, and be ready for a long, hard election season.