Given all the things I've said...

...how in the heck can I support Howard Dean if he's the Democratic nominee? That question was posed in the comments to an earlier post, and my answer was pretty much boiler-plate ABB. After all, I'm a Democrat, and I've come around after some pretty bloody primary battles in years past. If you think I'm tough on Dean, you should have heard some of the things I said about Bill Clinton, and kept saying until I cast my vote for Jerry Brown on the floor of the '92 Democratic National Convention.

I came around, though. Of course, it was made easier by the Clinton campaign, who actually sent National Campaign Manager David Wilhelm (now a Kerry endorser) out to the Washington State Democratic Convention to meet with representatives of the contending campaigns and assure us there was room under the Clinton tent when the time came.

Howard Dean has taken a somewhat different tack, seeming to push people into various categories of enemy, whether it's calling Democratic Congresspersons cockroaches, tagging the DLC as the Republican wing of the Party or generally dismissing anyone who defers from his personal vision as Bush-lite.

Will Saletan observes the Dean approach in Slate, and offers a noteworthy comment.

"Each time an opponent counterattacks, Dean's campaign exhorts his followers to send the opponent a message by sending Dean money. "It's a polite way of saying where you can take it," Dean explained Friday. But after a while, telling people where they can take it becomes a problem. The list of constituencies to whom you've given the finger grows. "Them" starts to outnumber "us." "

And there, increasingly, is my problem. When it comes to Democratic politics, I like to think of myself as part of "us." More and more, though, Dean and the Deaners I encounter are making me feel like some kind of "them." And if I, a hard line Yellow Dog Democrat, feel that way, how many folks have we already lost?