Dean & Dukakis: Two Peas In A Pod

Listen to In These Times writer David Moberg describing Howard Dean last summer:

Dean describes himself as an anti-ideological pragmatist. “I’m not an ideologue,” he said in an interview with In These Times. “I think the great problem with this president is that his is an ideological administration. Facts don’t matter to them. I’m a complete pragmatist. I really believe that people who have ideologies that can’t be bent and are insensitive to the facts can’t govern.”

Now listen to David Brooks discussing Dean’s recent foreign policy speech:

Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems.

The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren’t so unilateral.

At first, the Bush worldview seems far more airy-fairy and idealistic. The man talks about God, and good versus evil. But in reality, Dean is the more idealistic and naïve one. Bush at least recognizes the existence of intellectual and cultural conflict. He acknowledges that different value systems are incompatible.

In the world Dean describes, people, other than a few bizarre terrorists, would be working together if not for Bush. In the Dean worldview, all problems are matters of technique and negotiation.

Dean is widely said to have come this far by riding the crest of a wave of anger, passion, and emotion that is roiling Democratic waters. But in many respects he resembles another New England governor, Michael Dukakis, who famously declared at the 1988 Democratic convention that the coming election would be about “competence, not ideology.”

Although Brooks didn’t use the comparison, his conclusion reminded me of the famous picture of a helmeted Dukakis looking clueless riding around in a tank:

Dean tried yesterday to show how sober and serious he could be. In fact, he has never appeared so much the dreamer, so clueless about the intellectual and cultural divides that really do confront us and with which real presidents have to grapple.