Dems Join GOP in Ganging Up On Howard Dean (And The Party's Grassroots Funders)

Why are so many of the most powerful Democrats afraid of Howard Dean? And can anyone so reviled by both D.C. party establishments be all bad?

On June 2, Dean threw a bit of red meat to a gathering of party activists. Concluding a comment about a shortage of voting stations in Ohio last November, he jibed that Republicans might not understand the hardship of missing work to stand in long voting lines because "a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives." Republicans the party of privilege? Who but a hateful troll like Dean could even conceive such a mad thought?

The media deserve a lot of credit for making a scandal of it, readily eliding Dean's comment about GOP elites into a remark about "many Republicans." Of the various remarks for which Dean has been pilloried lately, Democrats were most vociferous in distancing themselves from this one. The reason was simple: The sort of folk Dean held up to contempt are the main funders of the Democratic Party, too.

David Cay Johnston, in his  book Perfectly Legal, writes:  “We know first of all that the “political donor class” is very small and very rich - about one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans give 80 percent of the total moneys received by the two major political parties. Many of the big donors, especially the corporate bundlers, [play] both sides; many give to one party or the other. But it all works out in the end, since they have far more in common with each other than with the other 99-plus percent of the country. Most of what you need to know about the futility and corruption of the Democratic Party - the me-tooism, the abject fear of fighting spirit or fighting words, the overarching role of money in all of the above - is summed up in this little episode.

And this brings us to the material reason the Democrats hate Howard Dean: He threatens to refigure the fundraising base of the party, however modestly, and thus to shift the balance of power in the party hierarchy.

The grassroots political activity of the citizenry and its inseparable adjunct, the entry into public life of non-organization politicians, is a constant threat to party organizations.   It is the perpetual endeavor of party organizations to discourage and even squash grassroots movements. 

This is where the attacks on his public words come in, and at more than one level.

(click here to read the rest of this illuminating article)

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