From the WSJ online compilation:
Here's an e-mail we received today from an Angry Leftist, who mass-mailed it to more than 40 addresses:
While I abhor violence in any form, what I think needs to happen within this country is for riots to occur against this regime. Similar to the riots that took place back in the 1960s. Also, when the RNC invades NYC next year for their convention, what needs to happen is riots similar to the one at the 1968 DNC convention in Chicago. There literally needs to be an explosion by the American people to wake the rest of the citizenry up.
We have no reason to think the writer of this missive is in any way associated with the Dean campaign, but the point is that it's an extreme expression of the mood he's tapping into--a mood, we might add, that seems to have grown more pronounced over the past couple of weeks as a result of the State of the Union kerfuffle.
But anger does not win presidential campaigns, and it's hard to think of a better way of ensuring George W. Bush's re-election than for his opponents to run riot in the streets of New York. Americans may be anxious about the economy, terrorism and war, but an anxious electorate needs reassurance, not rage. The problem for the Democrats is that their base is so furious, it may be impossible for them to nominate someone level-headed enough to make a plausible president.
Scott: This could get hysterically funny. The anger on the Democratic left doesn't have a K Street to get real the way the GOP did in 2000. K Street essentially bought our Shrub the nomination less to see him in the White House than to keep the nomination out of the hands of the true believers [Forbes, Keyes, Bauer]. If Bush ran a respectible loss the GOP [and therefore K Street] figured to keep control of Congress. Putting Bush in the White House was just icing on the cake. Given the economics it should have been a Democratic year. The Democrats lack a nonideological money base similar to K Street. Their big money is all ideological. This is gonna be fun. Now all we need is an October 2004 war crisis - NK anyone?
posted by scott 3:08 PM