George Will sneers at Howard Dean -- the thinker, and includes this item:

Asked to name his favorite philosopher, Dean named Lao-Tse because "my favorite saying is, 'The longest journey begins with a single step.'" That might make a better bumper sticker than anything David Hume said, but if that measures the depths of Dean, he and his supporters should take a sabbatical from deriding Bush's supposed shallowness.

I don't particularly like Dean, but I wouldn't necessarily blame him for using this expression. But is Lao Zi (or Lao Tzu) really the philosopher for a Democrat? Even this phrase in its original context shouldn't appeal to the interventionist party (all quotations from Charles Muller's translation of the Tao Te Ching):

A thick tree grows from a tiny seed.

A tall building arises from a mound of earth.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

Contriving, you are defeated;

Grasping, you lose.

And then consider these:

...when the sage governs,

He clears peoples minds,

Fills their bellies,

Weakens their ambition and

Strengthens their bones.

And:

Get rid of "holiness" and abandon "wisdom" and the people will benefit a hundredfold.

Get rid of "altruism" and abandon "Justice" and the people will return to filial piety and compassion.

Get rid of cleverness and abandon profit, and thieves and gangsters will not exist.

Not to mention:

The more regulations there are,

The poorer people become.

Best of all:

Ruling a large country is like cooking a small fish.

And finally,

The reason people starve

Is because their rulers tax them excessively.

They are difficult to govern

Because their rulers have their own ends in mind.

The Chinese original of "A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step" is (unicode) 千里之行始于足下. While checking that, I ran across a play on this one by Han Fei Zi: 千里之堤，潰於蟻穴, that is, "A thousand mile dike crumbles from an ant's burrow," meaning that neglecting small things can cause major disasters. But it's probably just as well Dean didn't say he liked Han Fei Zi.