As we've already seen, this column was ahead of the pack in identifying John Kerry's weakness. The same was true of Howard Dean's strength. (It did surprise us that weak Kerry beat strong Dean, but no pundit is right all the time.) On March 17, 2003, we made a qualified prediction:
If we had to place a bet on who'll be the Democratic nominee, and we were getting odds, our money would be on Howard Dean, the fiery former governor of Vermont, who has made opposition to Iraq's liberation a centerpiece of his campaign. With most of the plausible candidates--Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry and John Edwards--having voted in favor of last year's war resolution, Dean seems to have struck a chord with the far-left, Bush-hating wing of his party, which has an outsize influence in the primaries and caucuses.
On June 30, 2003, we published an article (separate from this column) analyzing Dean's victory in the far-left group MoveOn.org's online "primary." By this point others were starting to pay attention to Dean, who eventually became the front-runner. But on Dec. 9, 2003, Al Gore, self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet**, endorsed Dean, and we declared that "the Dean campaign is the Internet bubble of politics":
The same get-rich-quick dynamic is at work. Just as the dot-com boom was supposed to create immense wealth out of electrons, the Dean campaign promises to magically transform blind rage into political power. The Dean campaign . . . is populated by 20-somethings who are smart and technically savvy but also professionally inexperienced and emotionally immature.
This isn't to say that there's no substance at all to the Dean campaign, any more than there was no substance to the dot-com boom. The Internet actually has changed society, but its effect is more gradual and less revolutionary than the dot-commies thought a few years ago. Similarly, there's a genuine political movement at the heart of the Dean campaign, but it's one that has little chance of appealing to the majority of Americans.
For the most part, dot-com companies proved better at raising money from venture capitalists than at actually running a business and making a profit. The Dean campaign, similarly, is doing a great job appealing to core Democrats, but does anyone really think it will have the discipline and good sense to win a general election?
This thing has to fall apart sooner or later. If God loves Republicans, it will be after Dean has clinched the nomination.
Even so, we overestimated Dean. We expected him to lose the general election (and lose it big!), not to crash and burn in Iowa. What happened? For one thing, as we noted on Jan. 12, 2004, Iowans were put off when Dean came unhinged and lashed out at 67-year-old Dale Ungerer: "You sit down!" For another, even the Angry Left wanted to win the election and was convinced that Kerry, who by the way served in Vietnam, was "electable." (We warned them, but did they listen?)
And maybe the Angry Left was a smaller part of the Democratic electorate than we had thought. On Feb. 4, 2004, we linked to a long essay by Dean enthusiast Clay Shirky, the gist of which was that "Dean's imaginative use of the Internet made it easier to connect like-minded people from geographically disparate regions, and to raise money. This made the campaign seem very successful, but none of it translated into real success--that is, votes."
Yet it is an increasingly dominant force in the party, with Dean now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. It seems this is something the Dems need to get out of their system, and we thought they would if Dean got the 2004 nomination and got trounced by Bush, as he surely would have. To understand why the Angry Left is leading the Democrats astray, consider our Sept. 7, 2004, analysis of the 2002 election:
Between Sept. 11, 2001, and Election Day 2002, the Democrats mostly kept their foreign-policy differences with the Bush administration within the bounds of reason. Since the party out of power in the White House usually gains congressional seats in off-year elections, they figured they would maintain and extend their slender majority in the Senate.
Instead the GOP picked up enough seats to give it a bare majority. The Dems' failure to hold their Senate redoubt, more than anything else, was what unleashed the Angry Left. One could argue, however, that the 2002 strategy was a failure only when measured against the Dems' unrealistically high expectations, and even then largely because they departed from it in two key races.
The Democrats' net Senate loss was only two seats; this was nothing like the drubbing they took in 1994 or even the one the GOP endured in 2000. If those two seats had not swung the majority, the results would have been wholly unremarkable. The Dems managed to knock off a Republican incumbent, in Arkansas, and to hold off tough challenges to their own incumbents in Louisiana and South Dakota. One Democratic incumbent who lost, Jean Carnahan of Missouri, was a weak candidate, an appointee who had never even run for office before.
The other two Republican pickups were in states where the Democrats deviated from their strategy of accommodation. In Georgia, the great patriot Max Cleland went down to defeat because his pro-union vote against the Homeland Security Department favored a Democratic interest group over the defense of America. In Minnesota, last-minute substitute candidate Walter Mondale suffered when a memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone degenerated into a freakish Angry Left pep rally.
In 2004, the Democrats moved toward the Angry Left, and they suffered worse losses (the presidency and four net Senate seats) than in 2002. The Angry Left's reaction is to blame Kerry for not being angry or left enough. A telling comment comes from Markos "Screw Them" Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, quoted in a recent National Journal article:
To Moulitsas, the key lesson from 2004 is that Bush won re-election while losing moderates badly and independents narrowly to Kerry, according to exit polls. "We won the center and it wasn't enough," he insists. "So, clearly, we have to reach out more to our base."
According to this analysis, Bush got a majority of the vote by appealing only to his base, whereas Kerry fell short despite having the support of centrists as well. One might conclude from this that the GOP base is bigger than the Democratic base. Instead Moulitsas makes a basic error in logic: concluding that because centrists weren't sufficient to win the election for Kerry, they aren't necessary for future Democratic candidates. If the Democrats ever nominate a true Angry Left candidate, he'll be lucky to break 40% of the popular vote. But that may be what it will take to break the hold the Moulitsases now have on the party.
** Yes, Gore pedants, we know that his words were, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." |
