Dean's a no-no! The Democrats need a centrist as DNC Chairman, who can reach out beyond the base
Dave
Facts. Unfortunately, you seem to be alone in the party of Omar and AOC.
Republicans will call anyone who's to the left of Ronald Reagan a socialist, these days.
So it doesn't really matter anymore.
lol....dopey GOP has been accusing everyone of being a socialist since William Bryan Jennings:
In the U.S., this dates back at least as far as the first presidential candidacy of “Prairie Populist” William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Bryan, who ran for president as a Democrat three times, was variously attacked a “socialist” and a “communist” during each of his campaigns. His 1896 presidential nomination took the Democratic Party on a “perilous adventure in radicalism and centralization,” according to one conservative New York City paper. This despite the fact that he ran against actual Socialist Party nominees.
and then FDR:
But it was the 1932 election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that brought about the widespread partisan deployment of socialism accusations in U.S. politics. The Democratic Party candidate campaigned on a promise to enact a policy of expansive governmental action to rein in the private abuses of corporate America, provide baseline economic security and empower labor unions.
Republican President Herbert Hoover attacked this New Deal as “a disguise for the totalitarian state.” The American people were faced with a choice between “free enterprise” and “collectivism.” Hoover lost the election in a landslide.
Conservative elites in both political parties were shocked by the popularity of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Conservative businessmen recruited former New York Gov. Al Smith, a former Democratic Party presidential nominee once tarred as a socialist by conservative opponents, to call Roosevelt a communist.
“Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side,” Smith declared in a 1936 speech. “After you have done that, make your mind up to pick up the platform that more nearly squares with the record, and you will have your hand on the Socialist platform.”
“There can be only one capital,” Smith added. “Washington or Moscow. There can be only one atmosphere of government, the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia.”
and then Truman:
In what would become a very familiar line of attack, President Harry Truman’s proposal for a national health care plan was labeled socialist as part of a public relations campaign run by the American Medical Association. That PR campaign was run by the very first political consulting firm Campaigns, Inc.
“Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance,” Clem Whitaker, a co-founder of Campaigns, Inc., told a meeting of doctors in 1949. “Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America.”
and then LBJ, the Great Society, and the Warren Court:
When Democratic Party politicians began to discuss enacting a national health program for the elderly (Medicare) the American Medical Association hired the then-actor Ronald Reagan to make the case against it in a record. Reagan also wrote a letter comparing President John F. Kennedy to Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx.
During this same period, conservative segregationists in the South leaned heavily into accusing civil rights activists of socialism and communism. (The political parties were more ideologically diverse as southern conservatives tended to affiliate with the Democratic Party.)
Segregationists claimed that the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which banned school segregation, was the product of communist influence. “I have often wondered what was the source of the pro-Communist influence in the Supreme Court,” former Democratic Mississippi Sen. James Eastland declared as he demanded an investigation into communist influence on the court.
then Bill Clinton:
The health care plan introduced by Democratic President Bill Clinton was akin to “centralized bureaucratic socialism,” according to then-congressman Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, would similarly characterize the bipartisan S-CHIP program, which expanded health coverage for children, as “a step towards socialism.”
then Obama:
In the waning days of the 2008 election conservatives began to lose their minds as it became clear that Obama was going to defeat Republican nominee John McCain. At a series of town hall-style events, McCain supporters ranted about “Muslims” and “socialists taking over our country.”
The Obama years were a golden time for over-the-top accusations of socialism. Obama was “a hardcore socialist,” according to billionaire David Koch. His stimulus plan was “one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment,” then-Republican House leader John Boehner said. The U.S. will “have effectively ceased to be a free-enterprise society” after the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said during his 2012 presidential campaign. Fox News host Glenn Beck said that Obama was enacting a 100-year old socialist plot originally hatched by Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, and Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat. Then-Reps. Allen West (R-Fla.) and Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) both intimated that they had lists of Democrats in Congress who were secret socialists or “members of the Communist Party.”
then Hillary:
Same shiit every election by the GOP. YAWN
