http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0107-01.htmA Dennis Kucinich supporter defends Dean against the Establishment Dems.
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It should be remembered that it was Gephardt’s decision, as House Democratic leader, to kowtow to Bush’s neo-conservative militarism which played a major role in the Democrats’ unprecedented defeat in the 2002 midterm elections. Indeed, none of the six incumbent House Democrats who lost (except for one who had been redistricted to run against a popular moderate Republican incumbent and was expected to lose anyway) opposed the war. Gephardt’s naïve insistence that the Democrats had to play consensus politics with a fraudulently-elected right-wing Republican president was not only immoral, but self-defeating. (See my article, “How the Democrats Blew It,” CommonDreams, November 7, 2002.)
And yet his campaign insists that he is more somehow more electable than Dean...
The disturbing fact is that if the attacks by Gephardt and the others are successful and one of the pro-Bush Capitol Hill Democrats wins the nomination, the grassroots of the party that has been so energized by Dean’s campaign will be so alienated that many Democrats who would have actively campaigned throughout the fall for Dean as the Democratic nominee will instead stay home. The bitterness that Dean had been robbed of the nomination through unfair attacks from the party’s right wing could divide the Democrats for many years to come. <SNIP>