What doomed Dean was not that night in West Des Moines when he tried to lift up a downtrodden crowd. Rather, as he told “Candidate Confessional,” it was his own political limitations as an outsider candidate, and his inability to stop playing to his crowds and start playing to the party’s mainstream.
I knew I had to make the turn. And I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it.
Howard Dean on his 2004 campaign“I was giving them something they deeply valued, which was hope. And to pull back and become the establishment figure that I knew I had to become to become president was really hard to do because I had to teach them an incredibly unpleasant lesson, which is people like me don’t win presidencies behaving like that,” Dean said. “I knew I had to make the turn. And I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it.”
What killed the Dean campaign
Visionaries vs. Pragmatists
American politics doesn’t produce many visionary politicians.
And the billionaire class seldom allows them to occupy the highest office in the land.
There were exactly two visionaries that occupied the oval office in the twentieth century: John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
They were both from the billionaire class and both were accused of being traitors to their class.
We have the opportunity in 2016 to put another visionary into the oval office and he’s a Democratic-Socialist like FDR.
Let’s pray to god that he never feels the need to make the turn and become a pragmatist.
Not gonna happen with this electorate
What about Jimmy Carter?
And, in his own pragmatic way, LBJ? (On domestic issues, not Vietnam.)