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 Dean's
dream:
Time to get
real
By Keith Andrew Bettinger
WASHINGTON - The surprise Dean debacle in Iowa
stunned that state's seasonal population of pundits,
pollsters and prognosticators, who had predicted a
showdown between Congressman Richard Gephardt and Howard
Dean. Now that the Democratic Party caucus is over, the
former has left the race while the latter faces serious
doubts as to his viability as a candidate.
After
the first test that counts in the race for the
Democratic nomination in the US presidential campaign,
it is time to put away all comparisons to Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton, two outsider governors who seemed to
come from nowhere to win the nomination and eventually
the election. Dean doesn't have the Clinton charm or the
Carter modesty, but he does have some lessons for the
Democratic Party, and if the mainstreamers can figure
out a way to entice the voters that Dean "turned on",
they might have a chance of winning the presidency.
The Dean zeitgeist spread across the
country soon after deanforamerica.com was registered.
Soon DeanSpace witnessed a wave of migrants; in the
words of Asia Times Online's own Spengler,
"techno-Utopians ... pleasure-seekers [seeking] out
kindred spirits at light-speed" [Electoral politics as mass suicide: Howard
Dean, January 13], ready to create a
revolution, to change the nation, and to take back
politics in a sort of ultramodern populist movement.
Thousands of volunteers signed up and donations flooded
in as Dean's campaign, initially scoffed at by those in
the know, became the little campaign that could. Dean's
pledges to repeal President George W Bush's tax cuts,
using the money for health care and reducing the
deficit, as well as his staunch anti-war views, awakened
and enthralled voters who were disgusted by
politics-as-usual Washington.
Now Dean faces a
difficult road. The Iowa results show that his image as
a crusader from the outside and his anti-war message
have not caught on with Middle America. Either the
message does not resonate, or the overwhelming majority
of Democrats (in Iowa, at least) feel that Dean is not
electable. Iowa's tough lesson for Howard Dean was just
how far the grassroots approach could take him. It took
him from being a novelty to being a contender. The next
step may prove insurmountable. The Washington Post
reported that "polling data from Iowa [suggest] bigger
problems for Dean, who built a campaign relying on young
voters and opposition to the war in Iraq. Dean lost to
Senator John Kerry among the 75 percent of Iowa voters
who opposed the war. Kerry also beat Dean among the
youngest voters."
Dean needs to make a change
fast. Upon arrival in New Hampshire he seems to have
embraced a new strategy, telling an enthusiastic crowd:
"Today I am going to give a different kind of speech ...
Those of you who came here intending to be lifted by a
lot of red-meat rhetoric are going to be a little
disappointed," before refocusing on his successes as
governor of Vermont. Even with the new tack, seasoned
political analysts must be making bets on when Dean will
call it quits. There is more than meets the eye here,
though, and if Dean does leave the race, the manner in
which he goes has important considerations for
mainstream Democrats.
Even if Dean bows out of
the race, which he won't do while he still has money
(Dean raised US$40 million in 2003, a Democratic Party
record), he can contribute a great deal to the
Democrats' cause. Dean has engaged younger voters who
feel that mainstream candidates are too much a part of
the establishment to affect change. The narrow margin
between Al Gore and Bush in the 2000 election, coupled
with the low voter turnouts of the most recent
elections, indicates the potential power of voters who
have in the past stayed away from the voting booths. If
he can transfer the support of this constituency to the
Democratic nominee, it will be a huge shot in the arm
for the party. Furthermore, as traditional centers of
support for the Democratic Party weaken (unions), the
party will have to seek new sources of support.
Kerry and the other mainstream Dems will have to
tone down their attacks on Dean if they hope to appeal
to his supporters in a post-Dean world. The success of
the nice-guy campaign of Senator John Edwards and the
fact that Dean is no longer the front-runner should make
this strategy shift obvious and natural, but the
candidates will have to remember to hold their tongues
at debates and in interviews when referring to the
former Vermont governor.
For his part, Dean will
have to continue his campaign and will have to find ways
to keep his supporters interested and engaged. He will
have a Herculean task in keeping them from getting
frustrated and disillusioned; one Dean precinct captain
told the New York Times on Tuesday, "All the
phone-calling we did, we'd have people who'd say, 'I'm a
Dean supporter, I'm a Dean supporter,' but when it came
to caucus night, we only had 11 people show up for Dean.
It just seems like all my hard work's been for nothing."
Dean must assure like-minded people that their work has
not been for nothing; he will need to find some common
ground with the mainstream Democrats. He will have to
play the part for the greater good of the party and
"string along" supporters unfamiliar with the ugly
realities of campaign politics and the caprices of the
nomination process. The initiation has been rough; it
was a good start, and a good dream, but now it's time to
get real.
Dean must be wary, though, of the
perception that he has sold out, which would erode his
base of support among Spengler's dotcomheads. The
thousands of volunteers, sporting orange hats, cellular
phones and Dean wristbands indicate that there is an
unrepresented constituency out there, a group of people
who are smart, skilled and ready to go to work for
change. Dean has been pioneering in his use of the
Internet in reaching supporters and raising money, and
even has a NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car
Auto Racing) driver and team ready to compete in the
upcoming series of auto races. He has energized voters
in ways mainstream candidates have not thought of, and
has appealed to them in ways that establishment
Democrats have not. They should learn from his example
and actively court his supporters, incorporating their
demands for change into the Democratic platform;
likewise, Dean must remember his roots and give credit
where credit is due, lest his movement desert him.
The establishment Democrats should realize that
it was not Dean's positions that lost Iowa for him. It
wasn't his platform. It wasn't his anti-Bush polemics,
as the Washington Times asserts. It was his
impetuousness, his gaffes, and his mercurial
temperament. It has been, one might say, rookie
mistakes. For the first time Dean had been cast into the
national spotlight, subjected to intense media scrutiny
and merciless excoriation by his political opponents.
Conservative columnist William Safire called him a
"punching bag"; former presidential candidate Jesse
Jackson called it "mad Dean disease". Dean made mistakes
that Kerry, a veteran of four senatorial campaigns, or
Edwards, an accomplished trial lawyer, would not make.
Maybe it was even the regular campaign de rigueur
- churchgoing, flesh-pressing politics - that reminded
people that Dean was a politician after all.
But, as columnist E J Dionne Jr writes, "What
Democrats needed after their disastrous losses in the
2002 election was a backbone transplant. The party's
rank and file were clamoring for less timidity in
confronting Bush." Candidate Dean stepped to the plate
and took his swings. Mainstream Democrats, especially
those in the Senate, owe Dean a debt of gratitude. He
tested the waters of Bush-criticism when it was risky to
do so; he ventured out first when they would not risk
their political capital. Dean identified areas in which
Bush was vulnerable, and now "vote against Bush" is a de
facto plank of the Democrats' platform.
The
establishment Democrats would do well to ruminate on
Dean's appeal as well. Against all odds, his
worst-to-first whirlwind had to be doing something
right. And his third-place finish in Iowa, as he was so
quick to point out Monday night, represented a net gain.
And although some pundits argue that the endorsements of
establishment politicos such as former vice president Al
Gore and Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin hurt Dean's image as
an outsider, he also racked up endorsements from an
impressively diverse array of well-respected Democrats,
including Carol Mosely Braun, the first to bow out of
the nomination race, and former Texas governor Ann
Richards (who, incidentally, was defeated by George W
Bush).
Could part of his problem be that Dean is
too real? Is there too much truth in some of his
observations? Dean sometimes seems like a cynic who sees
US politics as predictable as television reruns. He was
exposed by the press for making disparaging comments
about the Iowa caucuses on a Canadian television program
before his presidential bid. He called the caucuses an
unrepresentative travesty, but later retracted this.
Never mind that there is an ongoing debate among
political scientists as to the logic and value of the
Iowa-first system. Dean also wondered aloud whether the
capture of Saddam Hussein would make the United States
any safer. This seems a reasonable question, given the
unignorable doubts that have been raised about Saddam's
connection to al-Qaeda and his quest for weapons of mass
destruction. Dean also said he was going to have to
raise taxes to pay for his health-care plan and to
reduce the deficit. This is too close to truth for a US
public that schizophrenically laments its social
inequities while whining about its tax bill every April.
And Dean also declared that a result of his economic
plan would be that "prices will go up at your local
Wal-Mart", meaning that he would protect US
manufacturing jobs by taxing and levying tariffs on
products from countries that don't meet environmental
and labor standards. Dean is dealing with some real
issues, but these issues call for structural changes,
sweeping, over-the-rainbow-type reforms that many
Americans might confess are desirable, but few would be
foolish enough to believe are possible within the
constraints of the current political dynamic.
The press is making much of Dean's histrionics
after the Iowa disappointment. His "frenzied"
performance showed a man who wants to win: a candidate
unaccustomed to defeat, and maybe a candidate a little
too enamored with his status as the
outsider-cum-front-runner. He's been portrayed as a
loose cannon; reading between the lines, a reader could
be forgiven for inferring that Dean is unbalanced. But
Howard Dean on Monday night was more like a general
facing the last stand, trying to rally his troops for
one final flourish at the last stages of a massacre. It
will be up to the remaining Democrats to ensure that the
Dean campaign did not die in vain.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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