Howard Dean talks out of both sides of his mouth in one week

[fossten]

Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Howard Dean's Doublespeak

David Limbaugh
Friday, June 2, 2006

HOWARD DEAN'S FRUITLESS OUTREACH

Which Howard Dean should you believe, this week's Howard Dean or last week's?

It seems he can't make up his own mind when it comes to reaching voters.

At least the Democratic National Committee chairman is colorful; you've got to give him that much.

However, He's not the guy to be leading the charge to reunite the Democratic Party with so-called "values voters."

The Washington Times' Greg Pierce reports that Dean was outraged when he heard that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist intended to call to a vote a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Dean called opponents of homosexual marriage "bigots."

He said, "At a time when the Republican Party is in trouble with their conservative base, Bill Frist is taking a page straight out of the Karl Rove playbook to distract from the Republican Party's failed leadership and misplaced priorities by scapegoating LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] families for political gain, using marriage as a wedge issue."

"It's not only morally wrong, it is shameful and reprehensible," said the enlightened Dean.

Now flashback a week or so and picture Dean on the set of the evil bigot Pat Robertson's "700 Club." Dean appeared as part of his effort to reclaim "values voters" for the Democratic Party.

On that program Dean reportedly said the party's platform provides that "marriage is between a man and a woman." Later, Dean had to apologize to gay rights leaders for incorrectly stating the party's platform position.

Surely I'm misreading one of these two reports. Which is it, Howard? Or, perhaps I should say, "Which face will you be wearing today: The bigoted or the enlightened one?"

Regardless of what the party's official position on gay marriage is, these two side-by-side incidents reveal the Democratic Party's predicament with "values voters." It appears they can't live with 'em and can't without 'em.

Democrats have been wrestling with this issue for some time now, realizing that Christian conservatives constitute a substantial part of the Republican voter base.

The Democrats' problem connecting with "values voters" was reinforced when 2004 exit polling data, along with other concurrent polling, showed that Democrats not only have difficulty connecting with evangelical Christians, but orthodox practitioners of most religions.

They do just fine with avowed secularists, agnostics and atheists, but not with those who attend church or other religious services more regularly.

A Pew Research Center poll showed that President Bush beat Kerry 64 percent to 35 percent among voters who attend church more than once a week and 58 percent to 41 percent among those who attend once a week. Those who attend just a few times a year favored Kerry 54 percent to 45 percent. But those who never attend favor Kerry 62 percent to 36 percent.

A later Pew survey had even worse news for Democrats. It revealed that only 29 percent of the respondents believed the Democratic Party is generally friendly toward religion (down from 40 percent in 2004), and 44 percent believed secular liberals have too much influence on the Democratic Party.

It also showed that people believed, by a margin of 51 percent to 28 percent, that Republicans were more concerned with protecting religious values.

Apparently all that scripture John Kerry recited during the presidential campaign didn't work. Nor did Howard Dean's protestations that true evangelicals believe the government ought to radically redistribute wealth.

Nor did Reverend Jim Wallis's book, "God's Politics," in which he advised Democrats to recast their positions on issues to make them more appealing to "values voters."

Even the multiple seminars and retreats the Democrats have had to address their waning appeal to values voters have had little impact.

Perhaps sooner or later the Democratic Party will realize that their problem with "values voters" is not that they have failed to clearly articulate their message on values issues.

It is that they have succeeded in communicating their positions, loudly and clearly, despite their efforts to obfuscate near election time.

The problem isn't that conservative Christians - generally speaking - don't understand where the left is coming from; it's that they do.

They have expressed open contempt for certain traditional values, even though many Democrats are Christians, too.

It's not that Democrats don't have values voters, too. But those voters are - generally speaking again - motivated largely by a different set of values.

The Democrats' outreach to values voters isn't an appeal to voters who share their values - they are already firmly in the Democratic base. It's a cynical ploy to semantically repackage their positions in terms designed to fool churchgoers (see the Pew Poll) into believing they are in their corner - politically speaking.

Too bad these reputedly "poor, uneducated and easy to command" conservative Christians aren't so easy to command.

 

[MAC1]

Democrat efforts to reach conservative voters are about as effective as John Kerry’s effort to reach 2nd Amendment right to carry advocates by renting a shotgun and hunting attire and pretending to be an outdoorsman. The democrat party’s attempts to appeal to conservative values are just as phony.

Democrats do not appeal to conservatives because their ideology, as exemplified by John Kerry, has more waffle than Aunt Jemima does. Time, and time again, they have demonstrated how they are diametrically opposed to Judeo/Christian values. Thus, it is highly unlikely the current state of the democrat party will ever appeal to conservative voters. The gay marriage issue is just one example of where they loose conservatives.

Dean continues the spew the same frivolous rhetoric that has failed to yield any positive results for democrats. It’s obvious that Dean is trying to isolate conservative republicans through the reverse psychology game. When a controversial issue is at the forefront, especially one with moral implications, democrats, like Dean, attempt to stigmatize conservative republicans by calling them names, claiming they are out of the mainstream, and/or claiming there are other more important issues to address. This kind of approach to moral issues has severely damaged the democrat party by demonstrating it lacks moral leadership. For this reason, some democrats (including Dean at one time) called for a stronger approach on moral issues in order to appeal to conservatives.

When it comes to moral issues, the democrat party has become too polarized. The party has drifted too far from its more conservative roots of the Roosevelt and Kennedy democrats of old. The problem for democrats is their party has been infiltrated with radicals like Dean and Polosi. The all out constant rhetoric and verbal assaults upon republican conservatism has become a mainstay of democratic strategy, which has been a miserable failure. Unfortunately, they think conservatives are too naive to see through their tactics.

However, on the contrary, unless democrats are willing to change their views and tactics and demonstrate moral leadership, they should not expect to win the conservative vote.