The Atlantic sets forth a few good reasons why Dean is going to get nominated, then trounced by Bush, i.e., he's the candidate of the new Dems, the non-union, upper middle class highly educated bicoastal bohemians who don't have a lot of votes to offer but do have $$ to fund his candidacy. In other words, a Dukakis clone.
theatlantic.com.
They've been called eggheads, yuppies, Volvo voters, limousine liberals, NPR voters, the new class, the brie-and-Chablis crowd, and most recently, "Bobos" (author David Brooks's shorthand for "bourgeois bohemians").
They are educated, upper-middle-class professionals who burst onto the political scene in 1968 with Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam War campaign. Their aim was to overthrow the Democratic Party establishment—the Washington insiders, the union leaders, and the political bosses—who supported the war or were at least loyal to the party that did.
Since 1968, upscale Democrats have been a force in Democratic presidential politics. They rallied behind George McGovern in 1972, Morris Udall in 1976, Gary Hart in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988, Paul Tsongas in 1992, and Bill Bradley in 2000. Now they're rallying behind a new favorite: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.
Dean is an educated, upper-middle-class professional, a physician, to be precise. He's anti-war. In this case, that means he opposed the war in Iraq. In June, he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "I question the judgment of those who led us into this conflict that has made us, on balance, not more secure but less." Dean is also running against the Democratic Party establishment. He declared in New Hampshire that "rank-and-file Democrats are just as mad at the Democratic Party as [they are at] the Republicans, because they don't feel that the Democrats in Washington have stood up to the president."
Dean's support rises sharply with voters' education levels. In the July Ipsos Public Affairs poll, Dean's support was at 9 percent among high-school-educated Democrats nationwide, 12 percent among college graduates, and 25 percent among Democrats with post-graduate degrees. Dean led the Democratic presidential field among Democrats with graduate degrees. In New Hampshire, according to a July Boston Herald poll, Dean led Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts by more than 10 points among Democrats with at least a college degree.
Dean has often been criticized—by the Democratic Leadership Council, for instance—as a left-wing candidate. But that's not exactly the case. "I am very conservative about money, much more so than this president," Dean has said. "I believe in balanced budgets." Dean's views—moderate on fiscal issues, liberal on social issues—fit his upscale base very well.
As governor, for instance, Dean signed a bill allowing civil unions, a legal status that provides gay couples with all the state-level rights and responsibilities of marriage. Support for civil unions rises sharply with education, according to a recent Gallup poll, and stands at 33 percent among high school-educated Americans, 42 percent among those who went to college, and 59 percent among voters with graduate degrees. Dean's views on Iraq also fit his base. Americans with graduate degrees are the most likely to say that Iraq was not worth going to war over.
Students of voting behavior have noticed a "class inversion" in recent years. Generally speaking, the better educated a voter is, the more likely that voter is to be a Republican—until the education level reaches "graduate degree." Among the best-educated Americans, liberal social values overtake conservative class interests.
The July Gallup Poll, for instance, found that 46 percent of high-school-educated Americans say they would vote to re-elect President Bush. That number rose to 52 percent among people with some college education and to 54 percent among college graduates. Among graduate degree-holders—now one-seventh of the electorate, not an inconsiderable constituency—Bush's support drops to 41 percent. That's where Dean draws his strength.
Dean is the hot candidate in Manhattan and Hollywood and among the wired dot-com crowd. His problem is that the heart of the Democratic Party has always been in the factories, the farms, the union halls, and the inner cities.
Last week in New Hampshire, Kerry moved to exploit that vulnerability, saying, "There are some Democrats running around who think that, somehow, the way to start the economy up is to tax people on the lower end of the income scale."
Dean proposes to repeal all of Bush's tax cuts to pay for new health care and special-education programs. Kerry would retain tax cuts targeted to lower- and middle-income voters. Kerry says, "Real Democrats don't walk away from the middle class."
Dean's criticism of Bush's tax cuts resonates with the former Vermont governor's upscale supporters. Most people with graduate degrees think Bush's tax cuts were a bad idea (56 percent in the July Gallup Poll). That view is shared by about 40 percent of those who did not get so far in school.
As Dean gains strength, expect to hear his competitors sound like born-again populists fighting the takeover of their party by "e-mail addicts." What's happening is not an ideological split in the Democratic Party. It's a class split. And we've seen it before—upscale McGovern voters versus downscale Hubert Humphrey voters in 1972; upscale Hart voters versus downscale Walter Mondale voters in 1984; upscale Dukakis voters versus downscale Dick Gephardt voters in 1988.
Yet, there's only one way a Democrat can hope to win. That is by bringing upscale and downscale Democrats together, as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and 1996. |
