Howard Dean and the tin ear of left-of-center bloggers

Immediate reactions to Howard Dean's latest ill-advised statements and the firestorm they've created:
1) I told you so (for past outbursts from Mr. Straight Talk, see here, here, here, here, here and here).
2) Once again, let me thank the Democratic caucus-goers of Iowa for preventing that man from becoming president.

On a more substantive note, when did left-of-center bloggers get such a tin ear? The normally reliable Ed Kilgore, Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias all think this is overblown or going to play in Democrats' favor. But they're confusing tough rhetoric with smart politics. When Republicans cross the line, it's usually with a demagogic appeal to the white, moderate-to-conservative majority -- an ugly but all-too-effective electoral strategy. But rather than playing to the majority, Dean attacked it, playing right into the conservative meta-narrative that Democrats are out-of-touch liberal secularists.

Drum's argument is that the controversy will force the press to cover the substance of Dean's claim:

[G]uess what happens after the initial firestorm has died out? With news hook in hand, reporters will get to work. Does James Dobson control the agenda of the Republican party? Are Republicans overwhelmingly white? Do party leaders work against the interests of the working class? This is exactly where we'd like the focus to be: on our issues, not theirs. After all, the answers to these questions are inevitably going to be bad for the Republican party.

I like Kevin, but this is completely wrong. First of all, where is the in-depth coverage? I haven't seen anything like this and I consume a lot of political news. 99% of the people who hear about Dean's comments will never see a followup story. One segment on "Inside Politics" did say that most Republicans (and a majority of Democrats) are white Christians, but that's not exactly news, nor is it going to move voters.

And even if the press blared headlines that the GOP really is made up of white Christians, it won't help Democrats because Americans don't like to think in group-oriented terms about politics. To do so is contrary to all our individualist norms. To illustrate this point, take Dean's argument to its logical extreme -- should people support the Democratic Party just because it has lots of minority supporters? I think most people would dismiss this idea out of hand (especially whites). If anything, making race and religion salient may make white Christians less likely to support Democrats, not more so. The fact that Howard Dean doesn't understand this shows why he is not the man to rebuild the Democratic Party.

Comments

[Concerned Dem]

Mr. Nyhan, you wrote "Americans don't like to think in group-oriented terms about politics." But isn't that how Dems became the majority party in the first place? Or has group-oriented campaigning simply assisted the slow erosion of liberal affiliation among Americans since Reagan's years of corporate favors?

[Democrat]

Brendan: you have little to no campaign experience, so your silly punditry about what is good and isn't good politically is laughable. Only from the ivory tower...

[freddie cook]

Let's see. Kerry took the moderate road, not high road. His measured speech earned him almost enough votes to defeat the GOP machines,NO pun, just truth. The DEMs dumped their true believers. How much worse can Dean's truth-telling do? Maybe we will lose the next election by more votes. Maybe we will win by waking up some folks who care about the truth.