Despite Successes, Some Fear General Election Rout
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 20, 2003
Howard Dean's success raising money and mobilizing voters has provoked a growing debate among Democratic and Republican strategists over whether the former Vermont governor has the potential to become a "transformative" political figure, altering, for better or worse, the financial and constituent base of the Democratic Party.
Although assessments of the Dean campaign run the gamut, they generally fall into two camps.
The first, and most favorable, contends that the former Vermont governor has found a way to compete with Republicans for money under the new rules of the McCain-Feingold law; that he has far outpaced rivals in both parties in the use of Internet technology, the newest tool to rally supporters and raise cash; and that he has broken new ground for voters to participate in campaigns. It also maintains that he has built both voter and fundraising momentum without depending on the special interest groups that have played major roles in picking nominees in the past.
The second, more jaundiced view is that although Dean has found a way to mobilize a liberal, activist base, capitalizing especially on the ease of credit-card contributions through the Internet, Dean's nomination could lead to a repetition of the crushing general election defeats the Democratic Party suffered under George McGovern, Walter F. Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis.
Dean and his manager, Joe Trippi, do not hide their assertion that the flood tide of support flowing into their insurgent campaign, much of it through the Internet, signals no less than a sea change in traditional Democratic campaigning.
"Nearly half a million Americans have joined our campaign to take our country back from a politics of cynicism and an economy that works for too few, and nearly a quarter million have contributed what they can to help us build the greatest grass-roots campaign presidential politics has ever seen," Dean declared last week as he filed a report showing that he raised $14.8 million in the third quarter of this year, more than any other Democrat, including past incumbent presidents.
One of the most outspoken proponents of the view that the Dean campaign will change the Democratic Party is Simon B. Rosenberg, president and founder of the centrist New Democrat Network.
"Dean raising close to $15 million is like a baseball player hitting 75 home runs," Rosenberg said. By using the Internet and such Internet vehicles as MoveOn.org and Meetup.com to collect a record-breaking amount of cash and to build a base of more than 470,000 online supporters, Dean has pushed politics into "a post-broadcast era" in which television may no longer dominate campaigns, Rosenberg said.
At the same time, Rosenberg argued, Dean has found a means to directly deal with one of the Democratic Party's major liabilities, the perception that it and its candidates are beholden to a collection of liberal "interest groups." In every losing Democratic presidential campaign since 1980, Republicans have portrayed the Democratic nominee as a captive of such interest groups as organized labor, feminists and Hollywood liberals, an image that was reinforced by the large "soft money" contributions that labor and wealthy liberals used to make to the Democratic National Committee before enactment of McCain-Feingold.
Dean is showing how the Democratic Party can become "a party that can transcend our interest groups, and that a candidate can get elected without owing anyone anything," Rosenberg said.
The nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute last week provided some evidence supporting Rosenberg's view. "What is also different about 2003 is the emergence of a well-financed candidate -- Howard Dean -- who depends on large donors ($1,000 or more) for only 22 percent of individual contributions and gets 54 percent from small donors (less than $200)," the institute found.
In contrast, President Bush, who has raised $83.9 million, collected 85 percent of it in contributions of $1,000 or more and 10 percent in gifts of less than $200. For other major Democratic candidates, the percentages of large and small contributions were: retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, 45 percent to 35 percent; Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), 88 to 1; Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), 78 to 8; Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), 77 to 11; and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), 78 to 6.
Despite Dean's ability to mobilize voters, some skeptics wonder toward what end he is leading them. A key Republican strategist, who did not want to discuss the Dean campaign on the record, contended that unlike transformative politicians of recent decades such as 1964 GOP nominee Barry Goldwater, four-time presidential candidate George C. Wallace and former president Ronald Reagan, "with Dean, all you know is that he is anti-war and anti-Bush, it's hard to tell what he stands for."
When Reagan ran successfully in 1979-80, his supporters would "have tears in their eyes about how Reagan would transform America," with a concrete agenda on defense policy, taxation and the size of government, the strategist said. With Dean, "you would be hard pressed to say that with the same conviction."
Charlie Baker, a Democratic operative based in Boston, said Dean has succeeded in finding a way for the Democratic Party to address the "huge alienation that is out there, more on our [Democratic] side than their side." And his effective use of the Internet may suggest that "in this post-broadcast age," spending on television ads is no longer as effective as it used to be. But he said he worries that Dean's appeal may not extend beyond a core group of alienated supporters and that a campaign tailored to win primaries could fail in the general election in the grand tradition of Mondale, Dukakis and Al Gore. Baker warned that Dean at times conveys "a holier than thou" quality that has characterized some past Democratic presidential campaigns and that Republicans have used to their advantage.
Samuel L. Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, who has worked in a number of Democratic presidential campaigns, said win or lose, the Dean campaign may well prove to be significant. "New blood is important whether it wins right away or not. There are 'new blood' losers and bad losers," he said. Goldwater lost by a landslide in 1964, but he helped start the conservative revolution within the Republican Party that culminated in the election of Reagan in 1980, Popkin noted.
In May, Al From and Bruce Reed, chairman and president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, released a memo attacking the Dean campaign, contending that his bid embodied the kind of liabilities that led to Democratic defeat in the past.
From and Reed described Dean as a member of the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the party, "the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one . . . defined by weakness abroad and elitist, interest group liberalism at home."
But in an interview last week, From muted his criticism. "Dean has figured out how to get people who feel intensely to give him money. The issue is: How expandable is that? That's what we are going to find out over the next several months."
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