The Howard Dean Legacy

No less a centrist Democrat than Ruy Teixiera, co-author of "The Emerging Democratic Majority" and a strategist with close ties to the "New Democrat" organization that propelled Bill Clinton into the White House (the Democratic Leadership Council) ... Teixiera has written on his own blog about Howard Dean as a "third force" in Democratic Party politics. Says Teixiera, now that the Vermont doctor is out of the race, "the temptation will be great to just forget about Dean's movement." Not a cool move. Dean revitalized the Democrat Party with a "transformative process" which must be honored, copied, propagated, and nurtured. To ignore that transformative energy, as many top-level national Democrats seem bent on doing, or -- worse -- to try to punish or silence those who supported Dean, as some of our suicidal national leaders are inclined to do (some of the same ones beating up on Ralph Nader like the Roman soldiers in Mel Gibson's new movie ... you know who you are, James Carville!) ... to diss Dean and what he accomplished is to willfully choose failure in 2004.