5 August 2005 @ 2:24PM >> ScrappeFace “reports“:

Encouraged by their close loss in this week’s special election for a vacant House seat in Ohio, the Democrat National Committee (DNC) has mapped a 50-state “virtual victory” strategy for 2006 and 2008.

“It feels so good to almost win,” said DNC chairman Howard Dean. “We now believe we can rally our base around the hope of down-to-the-wire losses in traditionally Republican districts coast-to-coast.”

30 June 2005 >> A good point in an excellent piece called “Making markets in the political economy“:

I watched Howard Dean on The Daily Show last night, and rarely have I seen a major political figure so thoroughly, even painstakingly, inept at appealing to voters. His remarks elicited cheers from the true-blue supporters in the audience, but only at the expense of alienating every single other person in the country. If he wasn’t making ham-fisted attempts to prove Democratic moralistic superiority by selective and theologically shallow quotation from the bible—an activity that even bible-thumping Republican congressmen undertake with more caution (and erudition) than Mr Dean did—he was claiming that his was the party of real moral values. Cringe. When was the last time you heard an RNC chair say something like that? Answer: you don’t, because the “Family values” guys know that you do not garner votes by saying “Everyone who voted for the other guy is immoral” . . . especially when the other guy got a majority.

8 December 2003 >> When President Bush tried to help American companies by imposing surcharges on imported steel, some Democrats—as you might expect—criticized him. After all, the steel industry is not only business, it is big, as in big belching smokestacks spewing cancerous clouds that eventually end up absorbed in the lungs of small children and cute, furry animals. From the perspective of his opponents, this one move could be used to symbolize the entire Bush presidency: they could accuse him of helping his corporate fat-cat buddies get rich by polluting while giving the unilateral finger to Europe, whose steel suppliers were put at a disadvantage. More >>

5 November 2003 >> Howard Dean says he wants to be candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. Is this his Sister Souljah moment, and does it signal a larger “southern strategy” for Dean? More >>