THE RISE OF HOWARD DEAN The True Anti-Bush
You can't be kind of pro-war, kind of pro-tax cuts and beat the president
newsday.com
By Stephen Elliott
Stephen Elliott is the author of four novels, including "What It Means to Love You," and edited the fiction anthology "Politically Inspired." He is writing a book on the 2004 election.
November 16, 2003
Because I have worked on a presidential campaign and written several political articles, my friends and students often come to me with questions on the 2004 election. Recently those questions revolve around the longevity of the Howard Dean campaign.
What I explain to everyone who is willing to buy me a beer is that one thing every candidate believes is that they can win. Of course you have to make exceptions for Denis Kucinich, who is building a movement, and Al Sharpton, who is potentially up to something more complex. But the real candidates all believe they can take it. When you scratch your head and wonder why Joseph Lieberman is still in the race, this is your answer.
When I went on the road with Howard Dean in July of this year, most of my friends didn't know who he was, and I live in San Francisco! When the Service Employees International Union backed Dean earlier this week, he went from front-runner to presumptive candidate. Of course, things can change in elections. Certainly not for Lieberman or Richard Gephardt, those guys are running on fumes. But the two Johns, Kerry and Edwards, are still circling, waiting for Dean to plow a campaign van painted as a confederate flag into an old folks home or an abortion clinic so they can make their move.
The real question is not why the unions decided to get behind Dean. They did that because they think he is going to win the nomination. But how did he get this far? Where did conventional wisdom fail us?
Howard Dean has stayed in the race for three important reasons: Ralph Nader, George Bush and business management.
Ralph Nader! You can hear Democrats snarling and snapping at the air at the very mention of his name. So let me explain myself. In 2000, Al Gore lost to George Bush by the margin of Ralph Nader's campaign. I worked for Ralph Nader in 2000, and the result of our protest has been the worst thing that could have happened to the progressive community: military tribunals, faith- based initiative, an attorney general who doesn't dance. In 2000, Democrats and progressives unwilling to compromise on a law-and-order candidate we saw as weak on the environment scuttled Al Gore's presidential hopes. Most of us regretted that as soon as the Bush administration tore up the Kyoto Accord, refusing even to recycle the paper it was printed on. With private prisons packed to bursting and welfare gone the way of the dodo bird, we thought a protest vote was the only option. What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time. We're ready to compromise now.
Howard Dean is a compromise progressives can live with. He flip-flopped on Cuba, he's in favor of the death penalty in certain cases, but he's pro-health care, pro-gay civil union and against the tax cut in a straightforward way. Most important for progressives - he's the anti-war candidate and the anti-Bush candidate. And that brings us to the second reason Dean has made it so far.
When Gore was running in 2000 he didn't have that vein of Democratic rage to tap into. He was the incumbent, coming off of eight years of peace and prosperity. It should have been an easy win. A vote for Gore was a vote for the status quo. But I saw it all over the campaign trail in 2000. Gore's workers were apathetic. Nobody loved Gore, or not enough to make a difference. The Bush supporters were fanatic. They loved their candidate and despised Clinton with an anger that can only be described as apocalyptic. One could say that their anger wasn't enough to win the popular vote, but that hardly matters. They shook the walls of Florida polling places, and if they had to they would have burned them down. The winner is the one sitting in the White House. This time the shoe's on the other foot, minus the peace and prosperity.
Dean accurately pointed it out himself, early in the campaign: You can't beat Bush by running as 80 percent of Bush. You can't be kind of pro-war, kind of pro-tax cuts. Because the voters are going to say if we're going to get 80 percent of Bush let's just take 100 percent and call it a day. In other words, the lessons of the Clinton candidacy no longer apply. Howard Dean has defined himself not by being Bush-light, i.e. supporting the invasion of Iraq, signing off on the Patriot Act, but as the anti-Bush. He was against the war, against deficit spending, and he was against the Patriot Act. He is in favor of something similar to universal health care and he says so. Even people like me who don't agree with his positions on gun control, capital punishment and the Middle East recognize him as something other than the status quo, an outsider storming the gates of Washington ready to return us to a time when we at least paid lip service to separation of church and state.
In a time of searching for an alternative he offers one, albeit not a great one. He's the best we're going to get. The other candidates, each for their own reasons, have not distanced themselves enough from the Bush presidency, and now it's too late.
The third reason Dean has made it this far has very little to do with the issues, but says a lot about the way he would run the executive branch. As CEO of his campaign, Howard Dean has shown himself to be something of a business genius. Unlike most campaigners in recent years, Dean runs a bottom-up candidacy, allowing and encouraging staffers at all levels to take initiative. His nimble organization has raised more than $25 million with an average contribution of $106, crushing his competitors, who are livid over his refusal of public financing. What they don't want to accept is that it's no longer about them, it's about Bush, and the refusal of public financing is about trying to compete with the president, who has already turned it down.
It's the bottom-up management system that encourages small donations from individual donors. It's also enabled Dean to exploit the enthusiasm of his supporters and why Wesley Clark, for example, is having such a hard time getting off the ground. Modern campaigns are often top-down, so afraid of stepping on their own story they're unwilling to engage the media and the public, and they keep tight reign on their staffers.
I'll give you a brief example. In July I called the Kerry campaign to ask what his public schedule was for the day. This information should have been on his Web site and surely the secretary would know. I was told a press liaison would call back. I was not asking for top-secret information. It took me 24 hours to find out information the campaign wanted me to have, and I had to get it from a senior staffer when I should have been able to get it from the shlub who answered my call.
Here's another example. I asked an Edwards worker in New Hampshire why he got involved with the campaign.
"You're with the press," he said, hiding behind a shorter, thinner campaign worker.
"In a way," I responded. "But I'm just asking you about yourself."
"We're not allowed to talk to the press," he said. I thought he would cry.
Compare this with my visit to Dean headquarters, where the person answering Dean's e-mail gave me her phone number and urged me to call her if I had any questions. Everyone in that office was willing to talk to me. The reason meetups and things like that didn't happen early for Edwards and Kerry is because their campaigns weren't structured to allow them to. They were afraid to take the damage that inevitably would accompany the benefit of allowing their workers to take initiative.
Will all this change after the primaries? Will Howard Dean move to the right, abandon his base and clamp the lid down on his staffers if he hasn't already? Probably. As the money rolls in he'll have more and more advisers cautioning his steps and reminding him of the political realities du jour. But we can only reflect on where he's been, not where he'll go, and learn our lessons from there. When people compare Howard Dean to George McGovern, they often mean George McGovern before the Democratic convention. What they forget is that McGovern was winning before the convention. It was only after the convention when he tried to button up and grab the center that his campaign unraveled.
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