So let’s start with this:

Howard Dean says “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks…”

Then in the debate, he’s challenged to apologize:

My question is for Governor Dean.

I recently read a comment that you made where you said that you wanted to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. When I read that comment, I was extremely offended.

Could you explain to me how you plan on being sensitive to needs and issues regarding slavery and African-Americans, after making a comment of that nature?

(APPLAUSE)

…and doesn’t.
Then, he says that

…southerners have to quit basing their votes on “race, guns, God and gays.”

Then, today, he apologizes for the Dixie Flag remark:

One day after his Democratic presidential rivals demanded that he apologize for his remarks, which they called offensive to blacks and southern whites, Dean for the first time expressed remorse. “I regret the pain that I may have caused either to African American or southern white voters,” he said in New York. What he had hoped to do, Dean said, was provoke a “painful” dialogue about race among all voters, including those displaying Confederate flags. But, he said, “I started this discussion in a clumsy way.”

Now, personally, as noted in a comment, I’m no fan of the Confederate Battle Flag. As I noted, “Now personally, I detest the Stars and Bars as a symbol of the most treasonous act in our nation’s history.” (note that Clayton Cramer has a longer post on the Stars and Bars). And here I have to split my argument and try and touch on two not completely unrelated points.

The first one is about the practice of electioneering, and the way that and natural human impulses seem to get smoothed out – by handlers, staff, and reporters, I’d imagine. Dean said something controversial – but arguably not untrue – was publicly pounded by his opponents, doubtless counseled by his horrified pollsters and staff – and backed away from his statement like a teenager from a sink full of dirty dishes.

Now what that says about him – that he’s sadly no more ‘genuine’ than the balance of the machined products of the electoral process, and that his vaunted backbone is, in fact quite flexible when key interest groups are involved – is of moderate interest in deciding who one might support in the election.

And what it says about our electoral process – that we boil the flavor and individuality – and backbone out of our candidates, and then wonder why they’re made of mush – is probably the most serious issue.

Much like movie sequels, where the energy and imagination of the creators is slowly leached out by the legions of ‘supporters,’ we get a vapid echo of the strong person the candidate once must have been.

The second one is about the social balance of the Democratic Party specifically. I’ve felt for a while that the Democrats have lost the pickup-driving blue- and pink-collar workers in their pursuit of the Skybox crowd, organized (typically public) labor, and identity politicians. Max Sawicky has a insanely great post (as in really smart until he insanely steps up for Kucinich):

As public policy, we can criticize hanging the Stars and Bars on the Courthouse without futile attempts to marginalize individuals for their own choices in this vein.

What’s at stake is whether we are going to have class politics in the U.S. Cultural conservatism, which in the South can include some type of sentimentality for the Lost Cause, or resentment of what is perceived as excess in the name of civil rights, should not be treated as an enemy ideology. I am not talking about adherence to segregation in public accommodations, denial of the right to vote, or other obvious breaches of democracy that nobody in good faith could endorse.

Coalitions are about reaching understandings through dialogue and/or compromise with people of different views. The Democratic Party needs to be a coalition of working people. It needs to ease up on cultural and social liberalism. I mean fetishes about gun control and tobacco. It needs to stop pretending that Southern whites are more racist than other people. It needs to welcome the “seamless web” Catholics who oppose both abortion and the death penalty. It needs to stop overselling rehabilitation and underselling punishment. It needs to find ways of establishing reasonable environmental regulation other than on the backs of workers. What it endorses as a party is ideally the outcome of a rational debate and compromise on these issues. For some, one or another such compromise could be a ‘deal-breaker.’ So be it. That’s the process we need. The constant and lodestar should be an unwavering commitment to the living standards of working people, and opposition to the corporativist, war-mongering ways of the Republican Party.

Without class politics, the Democratic Party becomes cats-paw of the big donors, a party of well-to-do white liberals lording it over second-class minorities organized by race and ethnicity. The economic policy of such a party boils is neo-liberalism (balanced budgets, free trade, smaller government, and Federal Reserve supremacy in monetary policy), with tokenism and crumbs for the minorities.

I’m not sure I’m buying his exact prescription, but I do think he has the disease diagnosed exactly correctly.