Because I don’t get invited to Howard Dean’s conference calls, I have to rely on the reports of others present to monitor the goings on. I found Ben Smith’s write-up of today’s confab provocative:
Could Governor Dean really be so deluded as to think he achieved a connection with the Confederate flag waving population? Perhaps he considers his victory in Vermont evidence of how the Confederate flag set just adored him. Anyway, I guess the Democrats have decided to make condescension a lynchpin of their 2008 electoral strategy. The problem with Chairman Dean’s strange new outreach program is that it’s transparently disingenuous. While Dean may pretend to feel common cause with a guy who plasters the Stars and Bars on to the back of his pick-up, we all know that if the Deans ever saw a Confederate flag bumper sticker adorning a car at the Brattleboro Whole Foods (where I’m told the price of arugula is quite outrageous), they would come down with a serious case of the vapors. That doesn’t mean the Democrats have to permanently cede the Confederate flag vote to the Republicans. If Jim Webb were the Democratic nominee, he could make a case for a shared kinship with those voters that would be honest and heartfelt. But Howard Dean? Not so much.
