In N.H., Dean lighting a fire among Democrats
Outspoken image spurs early surge notable even in outsider-friendly state
sunspot.net
By Jack W. Germond
Special To The Sun
Originally published August 1, 2003
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - The Portsmouth Herald published a front-page picture the other day of Howard Dean, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows as usual, delivering one of his red-faced campaign speeches with the harbor in the background. The accompanying article said he had attracted an audience his staff estimated at 650 people.
To veterans of the New Hampshire presidential primary wars, that was obviously a stretch - 650 at a rally in July?
But an inside page of the paper carried a photograph taken from above that showed the crowd was indeed 650 people, give or take a few dozen.
What this suggests to those involved in the contest for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination is, first, that the process may be more advanced than usual and, second, that Dean, the obscure former governor of Vermont, is lighting a fire in the electorate.
And that is news. A hot candidate can draw that sort of turnout here in the last week or two before the primary but not, as in this case, six months ahead.
"It's a phenomenon that's going on," says Mike King, the Dean campaign operative responsible for Portsmouth. "More and more people want to see him."
What is striking is that the insiders committed to other Democratic candidates are similarly impressed. Anita Freedman, a member of the Democratic National Committee and the city chairman here, is supporting Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri but concedes Dean "is getting a ton of support."
Joe Keefe, an astute political professional in Manchester, is supporting Sen. John Kerry from neighboring Massachusetts but concedes Dean "is on fire right now."
"My whole family is with him," says Keefe. "My mother's going down to his headquarters every day."
Joe Grandmaison, who ran the George McGovern operation here in 1972 and knows something about insurgent campaigns, says Dean is "going beyond the activists to get this kind of a crowd." At this early stage of the McGovern campaign, he recalls, "you were talking about living rooms" rather than outdoor rallies.
Grandmaison, now a director of the Export-Import Bank in Washington but still a player supporting Kerry in this election, sees this campaign on a different pace. "The whole thing has so fast-forwarded, it's amazing,"
At this point in 1991, he notes, then-Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas hadn't even made a final commitment to compete.
Hitting a nerve
Burt Cohen, a 17-year veteran of the state Senate who is challenging Republican Sen. Judd Gregg next year, has a similar view. "I've never seen the volume so high," he says. "There's nothing like adversity to pull people together."
But Cohen, although a Kerry supporter, recognizes that Dean is hitting a nerve with potential primary voters because he is projecting an image of outspoken independence. "People are so hungry for something different," he says. "They're tired of candidates not saying anything."
Two new opinion polls seem to reinforce the message of the impressive rally audience that Dean is a serious factor. Both show Dean and Kerry - in that order but within the margin of error - leading the field of nine candidates and comfortably ahead of former House Democratic leader Gephardt and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000.
Using up the air
Even before the new polls, Dean had earned wide attention from his success in using the Internet to raise money and in his general fund raising.
The result is an inclination in the media and political community to see the primary here as a two-candidate contest that, in a favored phrase of political operatives, is using up all the air in the campaign. "Nobody's talking about Lieberman, Gephardt or [Sen. John] Edwards," Keefe says.
More to the point, it has heightened the pressure on Kerry in the expectations game by which results here usually are measured. A narrow triumph here close to his home turf would be seen as a sign of weakness, a defeat as possibly fatal. (Dean is also from a neighboring state, but there are many more connections to Massachusetts than to Vermont.)
Some Kerry supporters have unpleasant memories of the 1984 primary, in which former Vice President Walter F. Mondale was supported by a sterling campaign operation and the backing of the party establishment - but was upset by a late surge to Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado. The analogy with 20 years later is not precise, but there are some striking parallels.
There is a long history in both parties here of candidates succeeding against the political hierarchy.
It happened in 2000 when Sen. John McCain of Arizona buried then-Gov. George Bush of Texas by 19 percentage points. It happened as far back as 1964, when a write-in campaign made Henry Cabot Lodge, then ambassador to South Vietnam, the winner over the two candidates on the Republican ballot, conservative darling Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, and the progressive favorite, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York.
On the Democratic side, the history is even richer. In 1968, then-Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota rallied the opposition to the war in Vietnam and mounted a campaign that embarrassed President Lyndon B. Johnson. Although he squeaked past this test, Johnson felt obliged to withdraw or be defeated outright in the next round in Wisconsin.
Four years later, McGovern ran a similarly effective challenge to the front-runner, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, and thus gained the momentum that allowed him to clinch the nomination later in the spring.
A quick start
Howard Dean's campaign is quite different from these in one significant respect. It has emerged at the beginning of the process rather than in the final two or three weeks. This suggests that the response he has evoked has been a relatively quick approval of the way he has positioned himself rather than a slowly growing appreciation of his candidacy of the kind that sustained McCain in 2000.
Dean also lacks an issue with the same resonance as the war in Vietnam.
He has stressed his opposition to the Iraq war and has assailed his rivals from Congress who voted for it - Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman and Edwards, of North Carolina.
The war is obviously a rallying point for Democratic liberals - many of whom live on the seacoast here - in their opposition to President Bush.
But how politically determinative it may be six months from now isn't clear. One finding of a recent poll suggests that it is Dean's image rather than a particular issue that may be critical.
New Hampshire Democrats equally divided between Kerry and Dean as their first choices for the presidential nomination were asked whom they would consider better able to conduct foreign policy, including the Iraq war. They responded 46 percent for Kerry to 18 percent for Dean. But asked who they thought would introduce more "fresh ideas" as president, the response was Dean, 47 percent, to Kerry, 17 percent.
Kerry-backer Keefe sees two phenomena behind the Dean surge. The first, he says, "is anger with all the Democrats [in Washington] for not standing for something." The other is the strength of the antipathy toward Bush.
Whatever the reason, Howard Dean on fire is the story with six months until the primary. The question is how long it will burn.
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