Howard Dean points out that Repub­li­cans (in con­text, implic­it­ly the lead­er­ship) have nev­er worked for a liv­ing.
So John Edwards and Joe Biden have dis­tanced them­selves from the com­ment (and by exten­sion, the Chair­man him­self). Both are gear­ing up for 2008 (already!).

Of course, Edwards is smart enough to be blog­ging, and has clar­i­fied his com­ments. I’ll reserve my ire for Biden, though Edwards is wrong to say that Dean “does­n’t speak for the par­ty.” To the extent any­one does, it must be Dr. Dean.

Any­one who thinks that Howard Dean should­n’t be mak­ing fun of Repub­li­can lead­ers is a moron. If we don’t start fram­ing Repub­li­can lead­er­ship as out of touch, we’ll lose every elec­tion from here to eter­ni­ty. The great weak­ness of Repub­li­cans is that every­one sees them as out of touch rich folks at the coun­try club. 

When Dean says that he’s for work­ing class peo­ple and Repub­li­cans are all fat-cats, that’s how we win. If we run from that, we look weak, dumb, and divided.

Set­ting aside the truth or false­ness of what Dean said, how he said it mat­ters, and was exact­ly right. Democ­rats need to make it their prac­tice to say tough truths some times, and say­ing it off-the-cuff lets you bury a retrac­tion a few days lat­er if need be, while get­ting out a crit­i­cal message.

Do Repub­li­cans go through such parox­ysms of apol­o­gy when­ev­er one of their lead­ers says some­thing dumb? How about when the chair­man of the RNC claims the admin­is­tra­tion’s sup­port for sci­ence is unprece­dent­ed when sci­ence fund­ing is being slashed? That’s pret­ty bad, but no one is claim­ing Mehlman does­n’t speak for them. No one stepped in to dis­tance them­selves from Trent Lot­t’s neoconfederatism. 

Why do Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers assume that peo­ple will tar them with the same brush as their leader? Why do they care?

What I’ve always liked about Dean is that he is real. Maybe he mis­s­peaks, maybe he’s a lit­tle ram­bunc­tious, but that’s only because he cares and he does­n’t script every sen­tence he utters. When he said in the pri­maries that Democ­rats should be reach­ing out to guys with Con­fed­er­ate flags on their pick­ups, every­one knew what he meant, even though some peo­ple pre­tend­ed it was a play for those same neo­con­fed­er­ates. No, it was a play for red­necks. Grow up.

Did Dean say that Repub­li­cans don’t work for a liv­ing? Not real­ly. What­ev­er he said off-the-cuff, con­text, his­to­ry, and facts all sug­gest that he was mak­ing the uncon­tro­ver­sial state­ment that Repub­li­cans are fat-cats.