This is why I support and donate to the DNC. This is the goal he stated before he ever ran for DNC chair. These words were spoken on the day he dropped out of the race for president. He formed DFA a month later, and then ran for chair of the party. I still believe these are his goals. This is why we donate monthly, and why we keep on taking part in our local and state party....even though they discourage us sometimes.
http://www.4president.org/speeches/howardean2004address.htmFebruary 18, 2004:
"Secondly, Dean for America will be converted into a new grassroots organization. We need everybody to stay involved. We are -- as we always have -- going to look at what you had to say about which directions we ought to be going in, and what we ought to continue to do together. We are determined to keep this entire organization as vibrant as it has been through this campaign. There are a lot of ways to make change.
We are leaving one track, but we are going on another track that will take back America for ordinary people again.Third, there have been a lot of people who have decided to run for office locally as a result of this campaign.
We want to encourage you out there in the grassroots effort, run for office, support candidates like you who run for office, and
we will use this enormous organization to support you as you run so we will change the face of democracy so that it represents ordinary Americans once again; government that will not be bought and sold.""DEAN: Believe in yourself and we're all together, we can believe in ourselves. Let me just say something to the younger folks here -- those of us who do not have my hair color -- one of the advantages of age -- and they're less than I thought there were when I was 25...
(LAUGHTER)
... is that you get to see things come around a second or third time.
And one of the things that I realized a long time ago is that change is very difficult. There is enormous institutional resistance to change in this country. We have seen that in this campaign as we literally terrified people sitting in their salons in Georgetown that they might have to look for work someplace else if we ever won."
DEAN:
Change is difficult. You cannot expect people with great privileges taken at the expense of ordinary working people to surrender them lightly. But the history of humanity is that determined people will overcome obstacles. And we will overcome the problems that this country is facing as a result of George W. Bush and as a result of a Washington establishment that has forgotten who sent them there."
"Calvin Coolidge said, The business of America is business, but forgot that
human beings are not meant to be cogs in an enormous government corporate machine; that we are spiritual people who need connections and have to have community again."Abraham Lincoln said that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth. You have the power to take back the Democratic Party and make us stand up for what's right again.
Allow us to fulfill the dream of Harry Truman in 1948 that he laid out where we would no longer be the last industrial country on the face of the Earth without health insurance. Allow us to stand up again for the rights to organize for ordinary men and women. Allow us to stand again for the principles of equal rights under the law for every single American.
You have the power to take our country back so that the flag of the United States of America no longer is the exclusive property of John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell; that it belongs to all of us again."