Centerfield’s Rick Heller has a fascinating post zeroing in on a Pew Center Study on Dean activists. He gives you a PDF file to the study and the link and quotes from a Washington Post story.
Read his post and the links in it. Clearly, the Democratic Party is at a crossroads: it needs to harness the energy, expertise and enthuasism of the Dean voters, but if it gives them the kind of party they seek the Democrats could well remain the minority party for some time now.
Writes Heller:”My recommendation is that Dean activists read this report, and reflect on how special they are, and how their values and instincts differ from the general public. Granting for the sake of argument that they are “right,” it’s clear that they have to figure out some way to bring the rest of the public along with them.”
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.