What Does It Mean To Be Electable?

Posted on December 17, 2003

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about how Howard Dean may win the Democratic nomination and then go down to defeat in November against Bush. It seems that some folks just think that he’s outright unelectable.

Well, I beg to differ. I think that unelectable is in the eye of the beholder. After all, Dean is the only Democratic candidate who has articulated an actual strategy for taking on Bush. All the others — whom nobody is calling unelectable, for some reason — simply fall back on their biographies. How will you beat Bush? “I am a war hero.” “I am a general.” “I am the son of a millworker.” And so on. Those are all great, but they’re not enough to keep someone from truly being unelectable. You need a strategy, a plan. Bush & Co. have $200 million in the bank and the devious mind of Karl Rove to figure out ways to spend it. Dean is the only one who has come up with a plausible strategy for taking that threat on. And he’s the one who’s unelectable? Puh-leeze.

To me, all the talk about him being unelectable just sounds like lazy thinking — like people who don’t want to do the hard work of trying to understand what Dean and Trippi are doing, and then judging for themselves if it’s got a chance or not, so they just fall back on the “unelectable” cliche. It’s too bad; if they took the time, they’d see that Dean is a lot of things, but unelectable is not one of them.

(Inspired by TBogg — if you don’t get it, think about how Google works and you will.)