Dean

So Howard Dean came to Gettysburg and I worked up the nerve to ask him a challenging question.

First thing to say is that the guy is really smart. You forget how smart and quick on his feet he is. When I was listening to him talk at first I remembered how sad it was the night he lost and both he and Kerry were interviewed on TV. The contrast between Kerry’s ponderous prevaricating and Dean’s crisp and intellectually hones answers was painful.

But anyway, I am listening and he first starts out about how Bust promised to be a uniter and he turns out to be a horrible divider. Then he goes on and a little later says: He is divisive, that is not what we do, that is was Milosovich did, that is wrong.

So I couldn’t take it (I haven’t ‘come out’ to the faculty yet, though I think they are starting to get suspicious). I say, “Didn’t you just compare the President to a mass murderer? Isn’t that divisive?”

And here he turns full body to me and I am expecting him to say something like, “well, maybe that was a poor choice of analogy but I think the point stands,” or something but no. He says “No, I didn’t”

That is what you have to admire. He gives his answer and waits for my reply, actually willing to engage in an intellectual discussion. It is then that I feel really nervous. It is just the strange sensation that everyone is listening and you suddenly feel really self conscious and worried about how much time you should take.

So I say, “well, you’re saying he is using the same tactics and the thing is that Milosovich’s tactics are mass murder, and surely if your are saying that they are using the same tactics you are making the parallel (at least that is what I think I said)”

Dean: I did not say that he was like Milosovich, I said he was using the same tactic of heightening ethnic tensions (he referred earlier to Bush’s use of the word ‘quotas’ do describe the Michigan decision, which is a well know racial code word according to Dean). And that is the same thing the Milosovich did.

I was kind of intimidated I hate to say. I replied by saying “well, you could say that Hitler kind of heightened ethnic divisions, so you could on that basis compare anyone to Hitler (the point I was trying to make was that on Dean’s argument he could just as validly have said that Bush was doing the same thing as Hitler was doing, substituting Hitler’s name for Milosovich’s name and then surely he would admit that the comparison whether valid or not would have been excessively divisive, but I am not sure I made the point clearly). At that point Dean graciously accepted victory and frankly I have to admit he had won the argument.

Afterwards he came by and shook my hand and was very nice. Someone got a picture I think.

Anyway, afterwards he is making a speech to a larger crowd and he does the same thing again, only worse. He says: We have a president whose only foreign policy is to be strong militarily. Stalin and Hitler were strong militarily. It is not enough to be strong militarily, you have to have moral leadership.

Now that is really breath-taking. Imagine if a Republican said in a debate about health care: You have to be about more than universal access. Mao and Stalin had universal access to health care, you also have to research and development.

Do you think that Dean himself wouldn’t be howling about the ‘code-words,’ the McCarthism, the Divisiveness? Even though the point is logically unassailable.

Still, I have to say that he was altogether impressive and intellectually engaging and I think it is a real shame that the democrats went with the cipher Kerry instead of the real guy Dean.