The Weekly Dish

Dean, God and Gays

To me, the most telling features of Howard Dean are his contradictions. He’s a blue-blood, running as a populist; He’s belligerently antiwar; he’s both refreshingly candid and then also equivocating.

His most appealing characteristic, in my eyes, is his now-lamented propensity to pop off unfiltered observations, to mouth off without consulting focus groups first, to express what many in Blue America feel, as they find themselves culturally and politically cornered by religious Republicanism. Far from doing what most politicians do — and steering away from the subject of homosexuality as far as possible — Mr. Dean weighed in.

He explained earlier this week his support for gay equality as a function of his religious convictions: “From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people.” He didn’t offer a careful, non-controversial mealy-mouthed defense of civil unions. But he did take a stand in defense of a small minority group — and he refused to cede the grounds of faith to the religious right. Maybe, as some predict, this candor will sink him. But that doesn’t make it any the less admirable.

Quote of the week

“Dean and his supporters identify viscerally with the foreign governments that resent being bullied by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Yet they identify barely at all with the largely voiceless people — in countries like Syria and Iran — who might consider a democracy’s projection of power into the heart of a region defined by tyranny to be progressive, even inspiring.” — from the New Republic’s endorsement of Joe Lieberman.

The editorial is a strong one, and if I thought Mr. Lieberman was even faintly electable, Id’ say much the same. But the editorial’s main theme — about the decline of sensible moderation in Democratic ranks in the last three years — had a small lacuna, it seems to me. The one man more responsible for destroying the Democratic centrist revival, for throwing away the Clinton legacy and for suicidally pitching his party to the populist left when he didn’t have to — was Al Gore, the man TNR endorsed last time around. Mr. Dean is merely picking up and re-energizing the pieces. Mr. Lieberman, alas, is one of the pieces.

Dean and foreign policy

One anecdote in the current New Yorker profile of Mr. Dean struck me as worth relaying. It’s Mr. Dean’s account of a foreign policy professor he once had. In Mr. Dean’s revealing words:

“One professor who made a big impression was Wolfgang Leonhard, who taught Russian history. He’d been a Party official in East Germany and had defected. A fantastic lecturer. He once told us, ’Pravda lies in such a way that not even the opposite is so.’ That really hit home. I felt he wasn’t just referring to the Soviet government but to our own at the time. You knew it from some of the things Nixon talked about — denying the bombing of Cambodia — or from Kissinger’s ’Peace is at hand’ statement, when clearly peace wasn’t at hand. They said these things just to get reelected.”

Those are words from the boomer left — especially the easy equivalence he draws between the United States and the Soviet Union. Whatever centrism Mr. Dean professes in domestic policy, anyone who can say what he said could, I fear, be another Jimmy Carter abroad.