 America is about to revisit one of the most turbulent decades in its history, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told a religious conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. "We're about to enter the '60s again," Dean said, but he was not referring to the Vietnam War or racial tensions. Dean said he is looking for "the age of enlightenment led by religious figures who want to greet Americans with a moral, uplifting vision."
| "Yes! A new dawning of the Age of Asparagus!" |
"The problem is when we hit that '60s spot again, which I am optimistic we're about to hit, we have to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes," Dean added.
| How can we be about to go through the 60s again? We haven't been through the 50s again. By my Acme Recycled History Calculator we're only in early 1942. So we're not even done with the 40s yet. And I'd like to know when we get to do the 20s again. I'm feeling the urge to Charleston. |
Anger over the Vietnam War and the country's escalating racial tensions made the late 1960s one of the most painful eras in American history. Republican Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sen. Robert Kennedy, as well as the riot-marred Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Later in his speech Tuesday, Dean appeared to backtrack. "I'm not asking to go back to the '60s; we made some mistakes in the '60s," he said. "If you look at how we did public housing, we essentially created ghettoes for poor people" instead of using today's method of mixed-income housing.
| We were just discussing that yesterday... |
Another mistake Democrats made in the '60s, Dean acknowledged, was that "we did give things away for free, and that's a huge mistake because that does create a culture of dependence, and that's not good for anybody, either," he noted, a reference to the Great Society welfare programs created by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. "Those mistakes were not the downfall of our program," Dean added. "They helped a lot more people than they hurt. But we can do better and we will do better and our time is coming." |