Paul Campos argues that Howard Dean “is, socially speaking, practically the same person as the current president.”
Both spent a good deal of time after college in the sort of aimless drifting engaged in by the hopeless poor and the idle rich. […] Both men assiduously avoided combat during the Vietnam War, by legal though morally dubious means, and both eventually decided to accept the immense privileges that their families insisted on handing them (Bush was more or less given a large ownership share in the Texas Rangers baseball club, while Dean was admitted to medical school despite his dismal academic record).
In other words, both Dean and Bush have lived lives that are monuments to class privilege. To be a Bush or a Dean means that you can spend much of your life failing to do your homework, while still having the option of growing up someday, and, with daddy’s help, becoming a doctor, or a governor, or a president.
Of course, Campos is stretching to make his point – there’s a world of difference between help getting into med school (even if that’s true, passing med school and building a career as a doctor are legitimate accomplishments) and being more-or-less given a baseball team in exchange for family connections. Still, Dean vs. Bush is not exactly a stirring choice for those who dream of a classless society..
OFF TOPIC, but, for what it’s worth, the link attached to the Expository Magazine banner is broken. The correct link is http://www.expositorymagazine.net/.
Thanks for posting this. Kucinich sometimes comes across as one of the “limousine liberals” because of the New Age way he talks about peace, but he also comes from a working-class background and has strong ties to the labor movement.
I often feel like the real Howard Dean is someone quite different from the candidate he’s portraying himself to be.
I know what you mean about Dean. Alas, it seems likely that he’s the candidate we’ll have, so we’d better learn to like him.
Jimmy – thanks for pointing that out. I’ve fixed it.
Remember, comrades, Frederich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, had a thoroughly bourgeois upbringing: his father co-owned a cotton mill in Manchester. Engels worked at his father’s company and then “retired from business”, it says here, before he was 50 years old. While he was working on Capital, Karl Marx depended on Engels’ financial support to put food on the table.
So enough with the class snobbery, OK?
The assertions made about Dean’s biography are 90% bogus in this piece – he didn’t avoid the draft, the Army decided not to draft him after he reported for the draft; he spent barely four years between graduation and med school; and his parents didn’t “insist” on sending him there, they wanted him to work on Wall Street. Google News “Howard Dean” and “academic record” and read the LA Times article about him: it includes a paragraph about his “aimless drifting”:
“Dean’s family and friends, and the candidate himself, say the odyssey grounded him in a world beyond his privileged boyhood. He worked construction, volunteered at an emergency room and later treated low-income patients as a medical student in the Bronx.”
He’s not born in a log cabin, but he’s not Scrooge McDuck either, people.
One thing I will say for Dean–he had the spine to actually be vocally against the war. And he had the guts to say that we aren’t any safer after capturing Saddam. Most of the Dems (with a few exceptions) out there are too busy rolling over for Bush to speak the truth on that count.
And FDR was a patricians patrician, and Bobby Kennedy was from money older than dirt. Nixon was from a relatively poor background, IIRC.
What was your point again?
Oh
And I don’t think Dean is inevitable. Things will get very interesting after New hampshire, when i expct there to be maybe three serious candidates left. With the field winnowed, the dynamic of the races changes. Dean is not a lock.
I’m from Ohio and a Kucinich supporter, but this attempt to link Dean’s life path with Bush’s — and smear him in the process — is ludicrous.
I am of the same generation as these men. The times of our lives changed many of us who, coming from middle and upper class homes, had inherited certain assumptions about how the world worked. Confronted by the civil rights movement, the Viet Nam war, conditions in the “third-world” and political assassinations at home, many, many set out on paths of critical cultural and self-examination, opening ourselves to alternate truths and the possibility of change.
Everything I read about Howard Dean indicates to me that he committed himself to that journey, one that continues still. The post-graduation wanderings; the choice of medicine as a career; the move to VT; inter-faith marriage, family partners-careers; communitiy activism;local, state and now national politics — these are the most obvious indications. I see the same thing in his political positions,i.e. Nafta and others — a willingness to re-examine assumptions in the light of shifting conditions and new evidence. In the single case of Nafta, he was expressing reservations as far back as 1998. Even during the campaign I have seen this. He opened himself up to criticisms from Edwards and Sharpton on his “trucks w/ confederate flags” remarks, really allowing himself to see how they were heard and understood from other points of view. I think he’s trying to do the same in talking about religion; exploring the social roots of his own reticence, honoring the more public role religion plays in different milieus, and trying to find a way to communicate with people whose folkways are quite different from his own.
Of course there is floundering, but effort is noble. It’s called “growth” and it is supposed to take place throughout life. Dennis Kucinich’s career is another example of it. Both these men, coming from far different backgrounds, have committed themselves to lives of both insight and action, to seeking out experiences and perspectives that challenge and reshape their own.
There is absolutely no — I repeat, no — evidence that George Bush has engaged in any sort of similar odyssey. Nowhere in his youthful experience is there any evidence that he even set a toe on such a journey. If he even contemplated it, his addiction-driven born-againism stopped him in his tracks. He is a dry-drunk, bible-thumping case of arrested development, a tea-totalling profligate son.
Why is it not a stirring choice for those of us who dream of a classless society? In a classless society, is everyone poor? Can only poor people take us there? I’d much rather see a person run this country who, despite coming from a particular class, works for all people, than one who can only see and understand the class they come from, whichever it may have been.
Wouldn’t you? And isn’t that what a classless society is all about?
The thing is, it’s damn hard to get into politics or in any position of power without money. Not impossible, but hard enough to be rare indeed. It’s not surprising that our politicians come from money, what’s surprising is that many Americans believe that that we live in a classless society.
Kucinich is the rare politician from a poor background who remembers his roots. As already pointed out, Nixon had no problem screwing the poor, and neither did Clinton.
Having grown up poor myself, I have come to find that poor people who “make good” tend to be more competitive and less forgiving of other poor people who have not been so fortunate. Class mobility requires a certain amount of cut-throat strategizing—depending on how far you want to go, of course. I have gone from poor to lower middle class without having to store dead bodies in my basement (so to speak), but then the leap is not so great. Were I to strive for entering the ruling class, all of you would be dirt caught in my cleats, bwa-ha-ha-ha.
Just kidding.
Kevin — You’re right, Dennis is a politician who remembers his roots. Our roots are part of our narratives and Dennis’s has been shaped by growing up in ethic working-class Cleveland, a city with a strong progressive tradition. But he has used those roots as the touchstone while building his own narrative through engagement in the larger world. And I think Dean has done that, too. I see these two men as part an on-going, and currently re-surfacing generational realignment based on egalitarian values rather than class.
Geez, I’m from a bourgeois upbringing too. It’s not so much where you come from as what you choose to do with your life.
CS and Flibbert, thanks for posting the more accurate info about Dean’s background.
Kevin and others: I think there’s a problem when the system is dominated by whites, and seems to (mostly) exclude blacks, especially at the top level. I think there’s a problem when the system is dominated by men and (mostly) excludes women, especially at the top level. It annoys me that election after election, the people we choose between for president are pale and male – and by saying that, I’m NOT saying that being pale and male necessarily makes your views progressive, or denying that there do exist some right-wing people of color and women. For people who dream of a non-racist and non-sexist society, the choice between a white male and a white male isn’t ideal – even if one of those white men was a saint with incredibly progressive views.
By the same token, for people who’d prefer a classless society, the choice between two silver-spoon multimillionaires isn’t ideal, either – regardless of how good either of them are as candidates. However great Dean is, he still fits into a pattern of unfair domination of our political system by millionaires, just as he fits into a pattern of unfair domination by whites and by men.
I agree with Ampersand, it’s a shame
However, Amp, I think you were entirely too kind to Mr. Campos by describing his argument as “stretching.” Did you read the rest of the article? The distortions of Dean’s past are bad enough, but the article’s main idea is that Vermonters are all rich liberals (he must be feeling confident that none of his readers know anyone there) and that therefore any issue such people claim to care about must be bogus; real people couldn’t possibly care about environmental protection or gay marriage. Not knowing anything about Campos, I can’t tell whether he’s a fire-breathing old-style labor leftist who hates yuppies, or a snide Republican trying to play on divisions among Democrats, but either way it’s a dishonest argument and doesn’t merit your attention. Class privilege in politics is worth discussing but surely you can find a better springboard for that discussion than this piece of crap.
First paragraph above should have said:
I agree with Ampersand, it’s a shame that so often we’re asked to choose between Good Millionaire and Bad Millionaire. Besides the problem that even the good one has a limited perspective, this encourages a nonparticipatory view of politics in which the best a working person can hope for is to root for the right celebrity/superhero.
My mother often used to say, “I weel believe America is a democracy when I see a poor black Jewish woman elected president.”
My mother often used to say, “I weel believe America is a democracy when I see a poor black Jewish woman elected president.”
Flibbet, Scrooge McDuck came to this country as a penniless immigrant and worked his way up from nothing. You’re distorting his background every bit as badly as Campos distorted Dean’s when you imply that he came from any sort of a privileged upbringing. A bit of reflexive anti-waterfowl prejudice on your part, hmmm?
Bobby Kennedy’s money was older than dirt? We ARE talking about the bootlegger’s son, right? The guy who handed over a canvas bag with a dollar sign on it and became ambassador to Britain — his kid, RFK, is the end result of a chest of jewels that came over on the Mayflower?
It’s very painful to spray soda out of one’s nose, and I don’t like to do it unless I have to. So are you kicking the Young Earth hypothesis up a notch, or what?
Amp: I completely agree with you that the class, race and gender dominance of our political system (to say nothing of the religious and sexual orientation dominance), especially when it comes to electing Presidents, indicates real social inequities that problematize our democracy. In other words, no argument here.
But I think it’s a bad way to evaluate a candidate. I don’t care if Lincoln was born in a log cabin or with a silver spoon in his mouth; I wanna know his position on the rights of labor, chattel-slave and wage slave alike. (These turned out to be evolving positions; fortunately, they went more or less in the right direction.) Dean and Bush have similar bios, but quite different agendas. Granted, they both remain squarely in the capitalist-friendly zone, but that’s a pretty wide zone to work within and has a lot of room for reform (improvement).
In terms of creating a classless society, you’ll need a lot more than two corporate-bound parties who fight over ever-narrowing constituencies of dedicated ideologues for half the election year, then tailor their message to a muddleheaded “swing voter” demographic.
So, yeah: alas.
It was FDR’s money that was older than dirt. His father’s family had been New York patricians for centuries; his mother’s family had made their money in the Chinese trade. RFK merely acted as if his money was older than dirt. But they both were very concerned with helping the poor. That Dean’s background is like Bush’s matters much less than what conclusions he’s drawn from that background. This is that “content of character” that Dr. King used to talk about.
If this sort of thing is the best that can be come up with for an anti-Dean argument, Dean must be pretty good.
Kevin wrote, “Having grown up poor myself, I have come to find that poor people who “make good” tend to be more competitive and less forgiving of other poor people who have not been so fortunate.” Yes, they often tend to think they made it purely on their own gumption, and that anyone from their status who doesn’t make it simply lacks gumption.
Bush is even worse: here’s a guy who didn’t even “make good” – he was ALREADY THERE, and who believes this was due entirely to his own gumption. At least the poor people who make it are half-right. As used to be said of Bush’s father, who has the same character flaw, “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”
If this sort of thing is the best that can be come up with for an anti-Dean argument….
It wasn’t an anti-Dean argument at all – even if the posts didn’t make that clear, I really think the comments would have. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Far as I’m concerned, a candidate who makes politics accessible to ordinary people, and who raises money in small donations from millions of supporters instead of being dependent on big corporate largesse, is probably just about the best choice those who dream of a classless society can possibly make.
I empathize with those who’d rather live in a world where Dennis Kucinich was doing really well. I’d probably be happier in that world too. But please, let’s not make the mistake of thinking there’s no difference between Dean and Bush because they both came from well-off families. There is a WORLD of difference.
I’d like to offer a belated apology for implying that Paul Campos might be a devious right-winger. Had I read some of his other columns first, I’d have known that he is no friend of the current administration. This particular column was still very careless.
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