Centerfield

The Republican Wing of the Democratic Party

Howard Dean's head must be spinning on this question of Democrats attacking other Democrats. At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire yesterday, he managed to both call for unity and criticize his moderate opponents using the dirtiest word in the Democratic lexicon -- Republican:

"One of the reasons I wish the others guys running for president would tone it down a little bit is that at the end, we're all going to have to pull together in order to beat George Bush," he told several hundred people at a packed town hall meeting.

And, he added, "even the Democratic Leadership Council, which is sort of the Republican part of the Democratic Party … the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, we're going to need them too, we really are."

You really are, huh? Really? How's it going so far?

UPDATE: An interesting reply from the DLC. They make the case quite firmly in favor of a centrist agenda. There's also some interesting background, like this:

Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has been saying this kind of thing throughout the campaign, along with other howlers like asserting that Bill Clinton wrecked the Democratic Party, and that Democratic centrists were cravenly supporting much of George W. Bush's agenda. Dean and Trippi are very smart men, and they know perfectly well that this rap is a central part of the hard left's hallucinatory revisionist interpretation of the Clinton years as one long act of surrender to conservatism.

Posted by William Swann at December 23, 2003 12:26 PM