Reply #23: Yup, same thing I posted [View All]

Where Dean treisa to scare Gays out of voting for the candidate they usually supported, Anthony Pollina, and the Progressive Party, because it was not the Republicans Dean feared, but the liberal democrats and progressives: From the article you just posted:


There are a number of Democrats and a number of Catholics who I have lost the support of, and I need to get that support back. The biggest problem for me (in November) is (Progressive) Anthony (Pollina). Anthony is going to take votes away from me and he’s not going to take any votes away from (Republican) Ruth (Dwyer). So actually the better he does, the more likely it is that Ruth Dwyer is going to be Governor.

http://www.mountainpridemedia.org/jun2000/news06_dean%20.htm

Now lets try for another view:

Vote your hopes, not your fears
by Alexander Cockburn
The Nation magazine, October 30, 2000

Pollina and the Progressives have taken the | Democrats' scare strategy straight on. They say, Vote | Your Hopes, Not Your Fears. The campaign is rich I with proposals on healthcare, environmental protection, a living wage, stability for small farmers and small businesses. Pollina has plenty of ammunition against Dean, who has been running Vermont longer than Clinton/Gore have been in the White House. It's the pathetic national story. In Vermont, 95 percent of men under 22 in prison do not have high school equivalency. In the past ten years prison spending has increased by 135 percent, while spending on state colleges has increased by 7 percent. One of every seven Vermont men between 18 and 21 is under the supervision of the Corrections Department.
And Pollina doesn't shrink from reminding voters that at the very moment in the early nineties when Vermont was poised to become the first state to have universal healthcare, Governor Dean, a physician by trade, killed off all such hopes, as he did a bill this year that would have established prescription-drug price controls.
Democrats of the stripe of Dean and Gore know how to talk the talk. They don't move a finger to expand human freedoms or opportunities, then boast that they alone are the bulwark against right-wing attacks on such freedoms and opportunities. After undermining choice and gay rights for much of his Congressional career, Gore now tells women and gays that he is the prime defender of choice and gay rights. At a gay event in Los Angeles, Dean claimed the hero's mantle for signing Vermont's civil union law giving gay couples the same state benefits as married couples. But he was never out front on this issue, moved only under direct order of the courts and then, in an act of consummate cowardice, nervously scribbled his signature to the law secluded from press or camera. So what does our Vermont parable add up to? Independent in name only, Sanders sold out to the Democratic machine long ago. He's no longer part of a movement. He's not a member of the Progressive Party and has not endorsed Pollina. In his reelection race for November, he's outflanked on both politics and gender, facing a Democrat to his left (Peter Diamondstone) and a transsexual moderate Republican (Karen Kerin). But the big story is not Sanders' dismal trajectory; it is that third-party politics in Vermont has moved out of his sad shadow and is changing the face of the state. The Progressives have also endorsed Nader.


http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Political_Reform/VoteHopes_NotFears.html