Fixing Mistakes

Ask not what your candidate can do for you. Ask what you can do for your candidate.

Howard Dean is not God. He is not Superman. He is not perfect. He is just a man, a good man, a smart man, a man who will make mistakes, and the man we want to make President of the United States.

So when he seems to make a gaffe, and his opponents pile-on, there is something you can do about it.

You can answer back. You can set the record straight. You can talk to your neighbors, write local editors, make some phone calls, get out in the market with your Dean button and talk to people.

That is what makes this campaign different than anything that has come before, as Glen Johnson notes today in The Boston Globe. We've been talking here for days now about "I am Howard Dean," but I really am. And you are, too.

As Johnson notes, "While traditional campaigns such as Kerry's have a pyramid-shaped structure running from the campaign manager on down, Dean's campaign is more comparable to concentric circles, with independent spheres across the country overlapping with Dean and the senior staff at headquarters in Burlington, Vermont." It is, he writes, a new paradigm of politics.

And so it is.

Look, folks, we know what Dean meant about the Confederate flag. It has been part of his stump speech for months. Those of us who support Dean in the South know about the flaggers, how they captured the Republican Party here, how they made the KKK flag a code word that swept white, male GOP candidates to victory with virtually no black support.

Dean doesn't have to answer this alone. He will do his best, but it is not just his burden. It's ours.

This is going to happen again-and-again. There are literally thousands of reporters and bloggers, radio airheads and TV demagogues, who are going to take apart what Dean has said, turn it on its head, and pretend that's the reality.

It's best we realize now just who must be responsible for speaking truth to this power. Dean will do his best, Joe Trippi will do his best, Zephyr, Kate, Matt and the rest will do everything they can. But in the end, this campaign belongs to us.

We have the power. And with that comes responsibility.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gay Saudi Arabia

Five Things Dean Supporters Can Do Right Now to Fight Terrorism