Howard Dean Would Be a Disaster for the Democratic Party

Early in 1948, while he was trying to decide whom he should select to run with him as vice president in the upcoming election, President Harry S. Truman invented a phrase that deserves a long shelf life.  The liberals in the Democratic Party were trying to convince him that he should accept Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas as his running mate. Truman had severe doubts and explained them in his diary as follows:

He [Douglas] belongs to the crowd of Tommy Corcoran, Harold Ickes, Claude Pepper crackpots whose word is worth less than Jimmy Roosevelt's...No professional liberal is intellectually honest. That's a real indictment - - as true as the Ten Commandments..."

Bruce Allen Murphy's recent biography of Douglas,Wild Bill, The Legend and the Life of William O. Douglas, has validated Mr. Truman's judgment in spades. Murphy convincingly demonstrated that Douglas lied about almost every aspect of his career, abused women sexually in his supreme court offices and wrote some of the most superficial opinions in the history of the high court. While Douglas lived, these misdeeds were either ignored or forgiven by his liberal peers in the media and the Democratic Party.

This brings us to the current front runner in the race for the Democratic nomination. Dr. Howard Dean. He has already shown alarming symptoms of professional liberalism. Let us start with his dismaying indifference to the truth. Recently, he and other Democratic candidates were asked to list their closest living relative in the armed services. Dr. Dean listed his brother, Charles, who had vanished on a trip to Laos in 1973 at the age of 23. Charles Dean was never in the military and was passionately opposed to the Vietnam War. He entered the war zone in a naive attempt to find evidence against the American effort to defend Southeast Asia and was probably murdered by Communist guerillas. His body was discovered a month ago.

Dr. Dean has also denied he encouraged a theory that the Saudis warned President Bush of the 9/11 attack in advance and he did nothing. In a recent debate in Iowa, he angrily informed Senator Kerry:"I said I didn't believe it and I said it right on that show." An examination of the National Public Radio tapes of the show reveals he made no such statement.

Then there is the matter of Dr. Dean's religious faith. Within twenty four hours of the New Republic's publication of a hardhitting article, pointing out that Dean, like most professional liberls, had no visible religious faith, which would almost certainly be a liability in a race with George W. Bush, Dean was telling reporters of his profound faith in Jesus and his frequent reading of the Bible.

The doctor blamed his previous failure to mention such an important part of his life on growing up in the Northeast, where religion is seldom a subject for public discussion. This contention must have startled at least two of his Democratic rivals, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who frequently mentions his Orthodox Jewish faith, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, who is campaigning as an ordained minister.

One of the reporters on the candidate's plane asked Dr. Dean his favorite book of the New Testament. He said it was the book of Job, the story of a righteous man whom God punishes for mysterious reasons. An hour later, no doubt after frantic aides took him aside, Dean returned to tell the reporter and his fellow scribes that he had just recalled Job was in the Old Testament, not the New Testament. This magical insight was reported in humorless prose in the Washington Post, without the slightest attempt to suggest that Dr. Dean's religion was not quite as profound as he claimed.

The New Republic story substantiated this conclusion with a wry description of why Dean, who was raised an Episcopalian, left the Episcopal Church. He got into an argument with the Bishop of Vermont for declining to yield some church land so that Dean and his friends could build a bike path along the shore of Lake Champlain. The irate Dean switched to the Congregationalist Church. Again, this suggests a man whose theological thinking is nonexistent.

Another trait of the professional liberal is the tendency to put"principles" above party loyalty. Henry Wallace was the quintessential example of this impulse in Mr. Truman's era. In 1948, he bolted the Democratic Party to run as a progressive who berated the president for failing to ingratiate the Soviet Union and its leader, Josef Stalin. Dr. Dean has already announced that if he does not get the nomination, there is a strong likelihood that he and his 1.5 million supporters would look elsewhere for a politician worthy of their support. They were" certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician."

The 1.5 million backers who cheer Dr. Dean's denunciations of the war in Iraq have a strong and, for Democrats like me, unnerving resemblance to the 1,157,172 1948 voters who applauded Henry Wallace for his denunciations of Mr. Truman failure to trust Josef Stalin, the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century. They also resemble the professional liberals who seized control of the Democratic Party in 1972 and ran another all out denunciator, in his case of the war in Vietnam, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. These criers of havoc seemed to have no awareness that they were tacitly endorsing a regime that specialized in mass murder of civilians in captured cities such as Hue, where more than 4,000 Catholic men, women and children were gunned down and in some cases buried alive, before U.S. forces regained control.

Rage is another trait of the professional liberal. Those who differ with him (or her) are not merely political opponents, they are evil enemies to be treated with contempt amd contumely. Thus Dr. Dean claims he is running against"The Republican wing of the Democratic Party." Henry Wallace was fond of suggesting his opponents were crypto-Nazis. Dean's followers go even further, and blatantly suggest there is no difference between Adolph Hitler and George Bush.

These traits have led not a few Democrats to suggest that Howard Dean will lead his party into the same calamitous defeat that engulfed it when Senator McGovern ran against Richard Nixon in 1972. The dimensions of the McGovern disaster are worth contemplating. President Nixon, a man loathed by liberals of all stripes and by the vast majority of the media, beat McGovern, 47,165,234 votes to 29,168,110. Nixon won 520 electoral votes, McGovern 17.

Perhaps I should add that Harry S Truman was a liberal. One of his biographers, Alonzo Hamby, devoted almost his entire book to proving that point. Truman backed a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform in 1948 that prompted Senator Strom Thurmond and 1,169,063 southern conservatives to bolt the Democratic Party. When Thurmond was asked why he was reacting so strongly to a statement that was remarkably similar to ones President Franklin D. Roosevelt had endorsed in previous Democratic platforms, Mr. Thurmond replied:"Yes, but Truman means it!"

There you have it, in a pungent quotation -- the difference between  a professional liberal and a genuine liberal.