Debaters fail to rock Dean's vote

Based on audience reaction inside Faneuil Hall and the inherent drama of opponents Al Sharpton and John Edwards taking Dean on directly, some in the media defined this defining moment as a real problem for the former Vermont governor. But what if, by luck of the draw or the barstool, you were seated next to Michael Everett, 22, at the Cheers Bar in Quincy Market right behind historic Faneuil Hall?

Everett was born in Louisiana and went to college there -- he has a degree in environmental science from Tulane University. His family moved north when he was 9, and he rents an apartment in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. Smart, articulate, and knowledgeable on issues like the Kyoto treaty, he is an independent voter who supported Ralph Nader in 2000. He likes John Kerry's stand on the environment but is worried Kerry is acting too much like Al Gore to give George W. Bush a real fight in the general election.

"I think Dean is a better matchup against Bush. He will fight harder," Everett says.

As a little boy growing up in the South, Everett owned Confederate flags. "It's part of Southern heritage," he says. As a young adult living and working in the Northeast, he says he understands why the symbol of the Confederacy and slavery is viewed as abhorrent and divisive. But he also knows bigots don't always signal their intent with decals -- and you can find them in Massachusetts as well as in Louisiana, in Saabs and BMWs as well as in Ford pickups. He didn't find Dean's remark racist, just clumsy.

"Democrats need Southern white votes," he says, explaining the difficulty of winning the presidency without winning the South as ably as any seasoned political operative.

The piling on of Dean for racial insensitivity, with Sharpton leading the charge, runs the risk of looking way out of proportion to the original offense. Dean should have said he wants to represent Joe Sixpack or the average Southern Joe. That is what he meant taken in the context of similar remarks over the course of the last year. In fact, last February, before the Democratic National Committee, Dean said: "White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us because their kids don't have health insurance either and their kids need better schools, too."

But because his rhetoric got lazy, and because he is threatening Richard Gephardt in Iowa and Kerry in New Hampshire, he now has Sharpton stopping just short of calling him a racist.

If presidential politics play out the way they have been for Dean, the showdown over the Confederate flag can strengthen his candidacy rather than undermine it. Based on his antiwar stance, his Democratic opponents first tried to paint Dean as too liberal to be the party standard-bearer. When that failed to derail him, opponents likened him to Newt Gingrich because of statements he made a decade ago regarding Medicare. Now they are accusing him of bigotry. Can he be too liberal and too conservative at the same time?

There are other dangers in this type of attack on Dean, particularly if it is fueled by Sharpton. To the "Rock the Vote" crowd, 1987 is ancient history. But that was the year Sharpton took up the cause of black New York teenager named Tawana Brawley, who claimed that she had been abducted and raped by six white men. The charges were eventually declared a hoax by a grand jury, which also exonerated a prosecutor she named as one of her alleged attackers. Before that happened, Sharpton played every ugly and divisive racial card he could to keep the media focused on the case. He never apologized for any of it. What right does he have to demand apologies from Dean?

Meanwhile, over at Cheers, the exchange over Dean's Confederate flag remark was watched with interest but did not seem to elicit very much passion or tension in this bar packed with young people. The reaction was more intense when the conversation turned to Iraq. Applause rang out when Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich sharply questioned what the United States is doing there.

As for Everett, he came to Cheers uncommitted to any single candidate but leaning toward Dean. When the debate was over he was leaning the same way.

Nothing he heard rocked his vote away from Dean or toward anyone else.

Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.