My support for tax cuts is based on the evidence that tax cuts encourage economic growth. Dean's position was based on opposing me. I have a position on a forceful foreign policy based on the evidence that such a foreign policy protects American security. Dean's position was based on opposing me. I was against Bill Clinton because I thought he was a menace to the rule of law. ean's position was based on opposing me. I was occasionally wrong. Dean was always wrong -- even when I was wrong. In sum, he has no independently arrived at ideas, just opposition to Republicans.
That explains his success with the rank-and-file Democrats. The reason Dean is at the front of the Democratic pack now is that he is the most vehement opponent of Republicans. This is what rallies Democratic primary voters: opposition to Republicans.
They have come to oppose the Iraq war not because they have any affection for Saddam Hussein but because the Republicans favored the war. They are against tax cuts because the Republicans are for them. This is what the Democratic Party's faithful have declined into, the party of opposition.
The Democratic Party has declined to the lowest percentage of the electorate in decades, 33 percent. The Republican Party is now the leading party. So what do Dean and his fellow candidates call the leading party in the country, "far-right"?
Now Dean's candidacy has induced Lieberman to warn that his anti-tax position and antiwar position threaten to render the Democratic Party the party of the left, an unelectable position in modern American politics. Lieberman, though the Democrats' vice presidential candidate in 2000, is floundering with Democratic primary voters while remaining popular among with the general electorate.
That tells us much about the kind of angry partisans that turn out for Democratic primaries. If any Democrat running for the presidency can lay claim to the great Democratic tradition of Truman -- and, for that matter, of Franklin Roosevelt -- it is Lieberman. He has ideas and persuasive reasons for holding them. He is for a strong foreign policy and balanced trade policies, and against repealing tax cuts. He opposes the Republicans not out of anger but out of principle and policy. His campaign has been statesmanlike, though I doubt he begins his day with a whiskey. Yet he is being swept aside by Dean, whose boast is that he is the angriest of all Democratic candidates.
The Democratic Party, at least as represented in its primaries, is the party of superior anger. Somehow, they still call themselves liberal.