We’ve put in our posts here a statement that Democratic fundraising is lagging under Howard Dean but Media Matters says that is not the case and documented it.
Read their whole post where they take the Boston Globe to task for using that assertion here. Here’s the important paragraph for our readers:
Media Matters for America documented that, as DNC chairman, Dean raised $14.8 million between February and April 2005 — roughly a 74 percent increase from the same period in 2003, the previous non-election year. Additionally, over that same three-month period, the DNC has raised more money in 2005 in comparison to the Republican National Committee than it did in 2003.
So we do stand corrected on that one. This is one of the weaknesses, by the way, of virtually all weblogs: bloggers base their analyses (in general) on media reports but do not and cannot confirm every fact in it.
All that being said, though, we stand by everything else we have said about Howard Dean as DNC chairman — and will have more to say in the future.
To boil it down: Howard Dean is turning to be everything that Republican strategists had hoped for and that Democratic centrists or Democratic liberals who hoped to expand the party’s based had feared. HE is becoming the issue. This fact is beginning to worry some Democratic members of Congress as well as the increasingly popular liberal talk show host Ed Schultz.
So far Dean doesn’t seem to be expanding his party’s base: he’s solidifying his base, scaring away some centrists, and insulting some GOPers such as libertarians who might be upset about the power the religious right has on their party enough to cast a protest vote or vote for more moderate Democrats. Dean should be wooing them — not lumping all Republicans together as white members of the Christian right who never worked for a living (for the record: TMV knows many loyal and militant Jewish Republicans who have worked quite hard). And we won’t run a correction on that one.
UPDATE: Project Nothing, which has also been critical of Dean, notes the above and adds:”Does this mean that I’ll change my mind on calling for Dean to go away? No, it doesn’t. He’s a walking soundbite and if Democrats want to win elections they’ll have to get rid of him.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.