December 6, 2003
The More Things Change....
Cut From The Same Cloth(27th Nov 2003, Lexington, The Economist)
Posted by M Ali Choudhury at December 6, 2003 3:42 PMDr Dean is an unusually interesting candidate: a no-hoper who turned himself into a front-runner by tapping into a rich vein of anger in the body politic. But he shares a remarkable similarity to George Bush.
The most obvious likenesses are draft-dodging and drink. Both men avoided the Vietnam war: Dr Dean failed his army medical with a bad back, but then spent ten months skiing. Both were drinkers: Mr Bush woke up with such a hangover on his 40th birthday that he decided to give up alcohol forever. It turns out that the same is true of Dr Dean. “When I drank, I would drink a lot and do outrageous things, and then I wouldn't drink again for a while. I realised that what was very funny when you're 18 is not very funny when you're 30.” He woke up with such a hangover after his bachelor party that he too decided just to stop drinking.
The deeper similarity has to do with social background. Both Howard Brush Dean III and George Walker Bush hail from the same White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Wasp) establishment: a world of blue blood and old money, of private schools and deb balls, of family connections and inherited first names. Their fathers and grandfathers were educated at the same Ivy League university, Yale. One of Mr Bush's grandmothers was a bridesmaid for one of Dr Dean's (they had been at finishing school together). Dr Dean's father worked as a stockbroker at Dean Witter Reynolds, and the young Howard grew up on Hook Pond in East Hampton and on Park Avenue. He was educated at St George's in Newport, a posh boarding school, and then at Yale, where he overlapped for a year with Mr Bush, who had been to Andover.So why do people with such similar backgrounds have such different political views? Fifty years ago America's Wasps saw eye-to-eye on politics just as much as they did on trust funds and Ivy League universities. Most of them were relatively relaxed Republicans: high-minded and fiscally responsible at home, Atlanticist and Anglophile abroad. The Bushes and Deans were both rooted in this tradition. Mr Bush's grandfather, Prescott (who, incidentally, also went to St George's), was a senator for Connecticut who believed in progressive taxation, internationalism and birth control. Dr Dean's father, “Big Howard”, managed the campaigns of a Republican congressman, Stuyvesant Wainwright II. His mother wore a dress emblazoned with the word “Ike” during Eisenhower's re-election bid in 1956.
These moderate Republicans began to lose their grip on the party in the mid-1960s when the debates that followed over the Vietnam war and civil rights polarised the country, pushing the Republican Party to the right.
The current President Bush's ideology, especially on social issues, is by many measures to the right of Goldwater's. Until recently, Dr Dean might have been cited as a Rockefeller Republican himself, masquerading as a moderate Democratic governor of Vermont. But he has become a national figure only by jumping to the left, espousing campus liberalism, denouncing NAFTA and calling for a wholesale re-regulation of business.
This is a fatuous article which will do little to advance European's understanding of Howard Dean, and that begs the question of where the Economist has been 3 years into GWB's administration. You know the object of the article was to "write stuff" when in discussing about one of the two most obvious similarities, both men are labelled "draft-dodgers", and left at that. Were both men happy to be among the many in their melieu that did not have to go to Viet-Nam? Of course. Yet, one man at least has the decency (or yielded to his father's advice?) to do a second-best: lear how to fly jet fighters and submit himself to the rigors of military life -- even if not in combat. The other man makes a mockery of his medical loophole by chosing to risk his life on the slopes. What did Dean's father say about this?
Posted by: MG at December 6, 2003 4:04 PMJeeze, would you relax a little?
Yes the comparison is stupid but its' hardly a major feature of the article.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at December 6, 2003 4:18 PMUmm, I stopped reading the article after the draft dodger comparison. The author forgets that National Guardsmen are currently dying in Iraq.
The author should have stated something along the lines of: 'while Bush can claim military service, it failed to meet contemporary EUroweenie manliness standards and should be compared to rich kids fleeing to canada'.
Posted by: Raymond at December 6, 2003 5:33 PM"hardly a major feature of the article"
You've got to be kidding. The article was written for the sole purpose calling George Bush a draft dodger. The rest was just filler.
Posted by: h-man at December 6, 2003 6:41 PMI would be more outraged by the draft dodger charge if Bush had bothered to show up for the last stretch of his National Guard gig. (Also, the Guard were not used in Vietnam, and thus places in the guard were much pursued by those who wanted to avoid going to Vietnam.)
The big sociological difference is theat Dean moved to Vermont, Bush to Texas.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at December 7, 2003 3:45 AMAll the Europeans want to know is how frightened they will be by any new President (and that is not even a serious consideration since the end of the Cold War). With Dean, they will merely be amused. He does shout like a back-bench Italian communist or a George Galloway, doesn't he?
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 7, 2003 8:28 AMJim:
No, I don't think they would be amused. I think they would sincerely see it a chance to reopen the dialogue on how the US is so dangerous and wrong--nothing personal, of course, you just don't see things as clearly as we. And they would offer to help, many sincerely. The issue would be whether such an administration would fall for this.
On the basis of just about everything I have heard so far from all the candidates, I fear it would.
Posted by: Peter B at December 7, 2003 9:08 AMEuroweenies standards of manliness? Try ... learning to fly a jet fighter as a standard of manliness.
Posted by: genecis at December 7, 2003 9:39 AMHasn't the "AWOL" charge against Bush been debunked? Who cares, of course. If it fits the agenda it's fact to some.
National Guard were not used in Vietnam, but that doesn't mean the Guard were "draft dodgers." Getting out of service on a medical and then going skiing for an extended time, now that's dodging.
Posted by: NKR at December 7, 2003 10:45 AMI think the comparison is spot on. But the point that seems to be missing is that many WASPs took the P seriously and when they saw what the America of the 70s had become turned against secularism with a vengeance. The main reason Dr. Dean didn't undergo such a transformation is because he was so isolated from the rest of America, in all-white, mostly rural, deeply conservative Vermont.
Posted by: oj at December 7, 2003 12:06 PMY'all keep saying "draft dodger" like it's a bad thing.
I don't see any problem with thwarting the government's intention to kidnap you and drop you into a war zone. If the government can't drum up volunteers, it should rethink the war, not resort to a draft.
Posted by: Ken at December 7, 2003 10:57 PMI think that the real difference between Bush and Dean is that Dean has a screw loose.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at December 8, 2003 12:47 AM