The Bike-Path Liberal Left. Liberals are so stupid!
Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude!
BY MARK STEYN
Wednesday, December 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
Like Susan Lucci at the Emmys, Howard Dean is getting better at putting
a brave face on things. When Saddam Hussein fell from power, the
Vermonter said churlishly, "I suppose that's a good thing." When
Uday and Qusay bit the dust, the governor announced that "the ends do
not justify the means." But on Sunday, Dr. Dean was doing his best to
be fulsome, if you can be fulsome with clenched teeth. Nonetheless, he
congratulated "our extraordinary military on an extraordinary victory
and an extraordinary success." They gave Miss Lucci the Emmy
eventually, and maybe by Labor Day next year, when the good doctor is
thanking Don Rumsfeld for the souvenir vial of Osama's DNA he FedExed
over, the voters will be feeling sorry enough to give Howard the prize,
too. But this weekend that pileup of "extraordinaries" made the
governor seem, well, ordinary.
It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic
candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert
what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot
out their lame clich=E9s, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by
which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians,
but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister,
all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before
the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do
any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary
line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy
coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying,
"Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions
roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have
speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in
New Haven.
There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews
asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American
court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference,"
said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't
make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think what's
left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave
floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But,
just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on
American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would
have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been
less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he
said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.
So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor
was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd
left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I had
a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I hasten
to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over gay
marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire,
this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was
not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay
controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked
Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to the
waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group," he
told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.
And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's
Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World
Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blas=E9. Obstruct plans to
convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you
down wherever you are.
Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame
very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry
peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting
out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that
it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty,
milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich,
has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but
he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say. The
main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be his
lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site to
try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear this.
By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in his
rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he turns
into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out of his
shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus, but
Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of anger. But
only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the
president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign
policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews.
David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually
became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the
quintessential latt=E9 burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart
guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of
politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics.
Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern Europe
with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the left
retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's what
Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was over;
instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy bits of
small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even more
expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean
represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.
Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican
governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as
liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's
understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms
punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to wiggle
through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns are empty
and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned with angry
"Take Back Vermont" signs, and the quintessential Green Mountain
boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to the
European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are
irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a
shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the
only way up the hill is by the bike path.
Unlike Howlin' Howard and the Burlington Episcopalians, I'm agnostic on
the merits of bike paths. But earlier this year, when the antiwar types
held "Bridges to Peace" demonstrations on the spans across the
Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, I couldn't help
noticing they were very much a bike-path crowd. It was February and 20
below, so they didn't have their bikes with them, but they did have
snowshoes and cross-country skis, for the activities that would occupy
the rest of their weekends once they'd got a little light demonstrating
out of the way. But, under their snowsuits, they were, metaphorically,
wearing cycling shorts. They loved the '90s because you never heard a
thing about macho stuff like war: it was all micro-politics, new
regulations for this, new entitlements for that--education,
environment, "social justice." For hard-core Democrats, the whole war
thing is an unwelcome intrusion on what large numbers of people had
assumed to be a permanent post-Martian politics. When you're at a Dean
get-together, you realize they're not angry about the war, so much as
having to talk about the war.
A little over an hour north of that Burlington bike path is Montreal,
the visits to which (for kids' hockey fixtures and his appearances on a
Canadian TV show) Dr. Dean cites, seriously, as his main foreign-policy
experience. Montreal is home to North America's largest Iraqi =E9migr=E9
community and on Sunday night the streets were full of honking horns
celebrating Saddam's downfall. You don't have to go far to see the
world beyond the good doctor's bike-path parochialism, but it's farther
than most Dems are willing to go.
Last weekend was confirmation, if you needed it, that this is not a
time for micro-politics. Many independents and a critical sliver of
Democrats understand that, and, in a time of war, they're not prepared
to stick with the bike-path left. When you put the pedal to the full
metal jacket, it's no contest.
Mr. Steyn is a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph and Spectator.
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