by Steve Perry

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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