• Keep on truckin’ Keep on truckin’ Former Vermonth Gov. Howard Dean was right on the issue but wrong on the rhetoric when he said that he wanted the votes of “guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.” The
• Keep on truckin’
Keep on truckin’
Former Vermonth Gov. Howard Dean was right on the issue but wrong on the rhetoric when he said that he wanted the votes of “guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.” The distinction could prove troublesome to his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
On Wednesday, Dr. Dean apologized, sort of, for the remark made last week to the Des Moines Register while he was campaigning in Iowa. “Feelings will be hurt,” he said in a speech at New York’s Cooper Union. Yes, and mistakes were made.
During a candidates’ debate Tuesday night, Dr. Dean’s opponents for the nomination jumped on the remark – gleefully is not too strong a word – and suddenly his long-shot-to-front-runner campaign was stumbling. A public event Wednesday at which Dr. Dean spurned federal campaign funding support was designed to show the breadth of his Internet-driven support. Instead it turned into a kind of media inquisition.
“Yes, that was an apology,” Dr. Dean finally admitted. “You heard it from me. It was a remark that inflicted a lot of pain on people for whom the flag of the Confederacy is a painful symbol of racism and slavery.”
For other people, it was a painful stereotype of Southern white males. Still others reacted in defense of the symbol of what they still myopically see as their glorious cause. Dr. Dean managed to offend almost everyone, no matter what his or her beliefs. This profoundly stupid remark seems destined to join George Romney’s 1968 “brainwash” comments and Ed Muskie’s 1972 tears in the snow as historic campaign low points.
Lost in all of this, however, is the truth of Dr. Dean’s premise: Democrats badly need to recapture the votes of working-class Southern men. The “Bubba” vote, some call it, or “NASCAR dads.” On economic issues, these voters are being hurt by President George W. Bush’s policies. Their kids go to lousy schools, their health care costs are rising and their manufacturing jobs are disappearing.
But since the 1980s, the Republicans have out good-ol’-boyed the Democrats on cultural issues – guns, God and the Pledge of Allegiance among them. Lower- and middle-class rural white males helped turn the “solid South” from blue to red on the election-night maps. As Al Gore learned to his chagrin, winning the presidency without picking up at least one or two Southern states is a difficult proposition indeed.
There may never be room in the Democrats’ parking lot for pickups flying the stars and bars. But there should be room for reasonable people who aren’t hung up on cultural issues to agree on basic issues of economic justice, good education and good jobs. Who knows but that Howard Dean and Al Sharpton, say, might even enjoy bass fishing.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
