I have to admit, the Howard Dean-Confederate flag flap lasted a lot longer than I expected. Finally, however, I think Dean figured out that an apology (or something close to it) may be the solution to ending this controversy.
As regular readers know, I’m not much of a Dean fan anymore, but I can appreciate that more has been made out of this than it probably deserves.
If you’re just joining us, Dean kicked off a multi-day uproar over the weekend by telling the Des Moines Register that he wants “to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”
After a few days of criticism from nearly all of his rivals, Dean was really hammered on this controversy in last night’s CNN/Rock the Vote forum in Boston.
A young man named Sekou Dilday, who had been prepared to support Dean, got the ball rolling by saying he was “extremely offended” by the Confederate flag remark, and asking Dean, “Could you explain to me how you plan on being sensitive to needs and issues regarding slavery and African Americans after making a comment of that nature?”
Read the transcript if you want to get the play-by-play of the skirmish that ensued, but to make a long story short, Dean was on the defensive (offering lines such as “I am not a bigot”), Sharpton was on the offensive (noting that Dean had misquoted Martin Luther King and saying Dean’s defense sounded “more like Stonewall Jackson than Jesse Jackson”), and Edwards was driving Dean nuts (telling Dean, “[T]he last thing we need in the South is somebody like you coming down and telling us what we need to do”).
Oddly enough, Dean was getting hit from both sides. Sharpton’s attacks made it sound as if Dean had been racially insensitive against African Americans, while Edwards’ attacks painted Dean as anti-Southerner.
“The people that I grew up with, the vast majority of them, they don’t drive around with Confederate flags on pickup trucks,” Edwards lectured Dean. “One of the problems that we have with young people today is people talk down to you. You know, you get all pigeon-holed. They’ve stereotype you. Exactly the same thing happens with people from the South. I have seen it. I have grown up with it. I’m here to tell you it is wrong. It is condescending.”
If you watched the rest of the event, Dean never recovered from these early exchanges. He gave a couple of standard applause lines about Iraq and gay rights, and even they didn’t go over as well as they usually do. He had lost the audience.
Worse, the media has been focusing almost exclusively on the criticisms surrounding the Confederate flag exchanges. The Chicago Tribune ran the worst headline possible for the Dean campaign: “Howard Dean: ‘I am not a bigot'”
Well, if you have headlines mentioning your denial about being a bigot, people are going to start wondering why you were accused of bigotry in the first place.
Stubbornly, Dean stood his ground and refused to apologize or admit mistake. Edwards put him on the spot, saying, “[U]nless I missed something, Governor Dean still has not said he was wrong. Were you wrong, Howard?”
Dean wouldn’t hear of it. “No, I wasn’t, John Edwards, because people who vote who fly the Confederate flag, I think they are wrong because I think the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. But I think there are lot of poor people who fly that flag because the Republicans have been dividing us by race since 1968 with their Southern race strategy.”
That didn’t make things any better. By today, the mess was dominating nearly all of Dean’s attention. While he refused to apologize last night, Dean came close to doing just that today.
“I regret the pain that I have caused, but I will tell you there is no easy way to do this and there will be pain as we discuss it and we must face this together hand in hand as Dr. King and Abraham Lincoln asked us to do,” Dean said.
By acknowledging that he caused “pain,” Dean’s near-apology will probably help make this go away. The question now becomes one of whether this controversy will have a lasting impact.
One thing’s for sure; the Confederate flag mess has taken a toll on Dean.
“Governor Dean was trying to reach out to disenfranchised voters in the South, but he needs to be more careful,” said Gov. Bill Richardson (D) of New Mexico. “I don’t think this is serious, but it has put a little bit of a dent in his front-runner status.”