Interesting column
The Clinton Candidate
Howard Dean didn't just come out of left field.
BY PETER BEINART
Monday, August 11, 2003 12:01 a.m.
George W. Bush, many commentators believe, created Howard Dean. The theory goes like this: The president's Iraq war and his push for repeated upper-bracket tax cuts have enraged the Democratic base. And that has left Mr. Dean, the angriest of the major Democratic contenders, perfectly in sync with his party's mood.
But there's another president who bears at least as much responsibility for the Vermont governor's stunning ascent: Bill Clinton. Insiders assume that Mr. Clinton favors John Edwards. But the Clinton presidency actually laid the foundations for the success of Howard Dean.
Mr. Dean's great structural advantage is that he is a governor running against four senators and a former House minority leader. It's no accident that since 1976, five governors (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) have won their party's presidential nomination, compared with only one sitting senator (Bob Dole). Governors appear less stale to the Washington-based press corps that covers presidential campaigns, and therefore better qualify for the coveted role of "next big thing." Governors are not tainted by the compromises that members of Congress inevitably make as part of the legislative process. Unlike members of Congress, governors can point to their states as models for what they will do for the country at large. And as executives, governors often appear decisive, while senators appear merely deliberative.
Mr. Dean has exploited these advantages masterfully. He has attacked "Democrats in Washington" who have "only half-heartedly" fought against the very agenda that is "destroying the democratic dream of America." By citing Vermont, he has proven his health-care and budget-balancing bona fides in a way that none of his opponents can. And he is an intriguing, novel story for the press.
The mystery of the 2004 Democratic campaign isn't that a governor has caught on--that happens in most presidential years. The mystery is that there is only one governor in the field, and that he comes from such a tiny state. Usually, presidential fields are roughly split between governors and senators. And usually, the governors hail from large states (Bush, Reagan) or at least midsize ones (Carter, Dukakis). Even Mr. Clinton's Arkansas is four times the size of Vermont. Were there another governor in this year's Democratic pack, particularly one from a larger state, he would likely have exploited the same institutional advantages Mr. Dean has, and therefore detracted at least somewhat from the Vermonter's allure.
To understand why there is not, look at Bill Clinton's stewardship of the national Democratic Party. Any governor running for president in 2004 would have come of political age in the 1990s. And when Mr. Clinton took office in 1993, the states looked like a fertile source of eventual Democratic presidential contenders. Democrats controlled the governors' mansions in 28 states, including six of the 10 largest.
But the liberal taint of Mr. Clinton's first two years--on gays in the military, guns, and health care--decimated Democratic governors across the country. By 1995, there were only 19, and only one in the nine largest states. Gone were heavyweights like Mario Cuomo, Ann Richards and Jim Florio, and numerous others who saw promising careers cut short. Several weeks after the 1994 disaster, Mr. Clinton invited a handful of Democratic governors to a private dinner and received an earful for having abandoned the center. Among the participants was Howard Dean, who told the Associated Press, "I can assure you there was no one at the table arguing the president should go to the left."
Mr. Clinton took their advice. And over the next few years, he capitalized on GOP radicalism to re-establish his moderate credentials and resuscitate the Democrats in Washington. By the time Mr. Clinton left office, the Democrats had regained three Senate seats and eight House ones. But in the states, where politics is generally less ideologically polarized, Republicans did not fall prey to the same overreach, and Democrats never recovered, ending the decade with even fewer governorships than they held in 1995.
So the 1990s, a productive decade for the Democratic Party in Washington, was an extremely unproductive one for Democratic governors. Of the governors who captured the media spotlight as potential national candidates during the Clinton years--George Pataki, Tom Ridge, Tommy Thompson, Christine Todd Whitman, Jeb Bush and W. himself--all were Republicans. In 2000, no Democratic governor gained serious consideration as a challenger to Al Gore. When pundits began speculating about 2004, talk naturally turned to Gray Davis, the only Democrat who led a large state. But just as he might have geared up for a presidential run, an energy crisis and a budget crisis mashed California's governor into political pulp. The only other governor who even merited a mention among politicos--Georgia's Roy Barnes--went down to defeat last fall. The result: Mr. Dean has had the most valuable political niche in the presidential field all to himself. It has barely mattered that the state he led is tiny, ethnically homogeneous and ideologically extreme.
Barely mattered in the primary, that is. If Mr. Dean wins the nomination, party elders will wonder why the Democratic hinterland didn't produce a more experienced, centrist candidate able to ride grassroots frustration with Washington to primary victory. The answer will lie in Chappaqua.
Mr. Beinart is the editor of the New Republic.
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