Deans army of storm chasers launch assault for presidency
Suzanne Goldenberg
Saturday January 17, 2004
The Guardian
Carol Haas's entry into American politics began on the cold dawn of an Ohio morning, with the last of her run of midnight nursing shifts. She got off work and into a waiting car, riding 10 hours across the rolling plains of the midwest before she got a chance to sleep - hungry, on a bunk bed, surrounded by 11 male strangers, in a cabin with no indoor plumbing - at a girl scout camp 20 miles from town.
Ms Haas, a 55-year-old nurse, is beaming. She is kneeling on a floor, stuffing envelopes for Howard Dean in the run-up to the first popular challenge of the eight contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, which takes place in Iowa on Monday.
She is going to spend three days on envelope duty - or knocking on the doors of strangers asking them to come out to vote Dean - before going straight back to her job in Akron, Ohio.
She can barely contain her admiration for Mr Dean. "He brought the power to the people," she says.
In the Des Moines headquarters of Mr Dean, Ms Haas's single-minded devotion to him is hardly exceptional. For months now, his supporters have been gathering their forces - connecting over the internet and in "meet-ups", the monthly gatherings where supporters write letters and pass on strategy suggestions to paid campaign staff. This weekend, if all goes well, that energy will be channelled into what Dean organisers are calling the "Perfect Storm".
Other developments in Iowa could bring Mr Dean's political momentum to a stop. Two opinion polls this week put him in a dead heat in a four-way contest against the Missouri congressman and virtual native son, Dick Gephardt, and Senators John Kerry and John Edwards whose campaigns have experienced last-minute surges in support. After weeks in the doldrums, Mr Kerry is drawing huge crowds.
Mr Kerry, a war hero, has his own ground troops drawn from Vietnam vets, and Mr Gephardt has the industrial unions, who have pulled up in large black trucks and matching jackets.
But Mr Dean has the "storm chasers", some 2,500 volunteers who are expected to converge on Iowa at the weekend. Organisers say there has been nothing like it since the heady activist days of the 1960s and 1970s, and that the resulting force field of energy, hope and commitment is going to tip the balance in favour or Mr Dean in Monday's caucuses.
None of Mr Dean's opponents can match the scale of his volunteer brigades in their orange knit hats, or the sense of commitment and urgency.
"I have come to believe that this is the most important election of my lifetime," says Jerry Cayford, 46, from Maryland. "We are either going to go some place to be a country I don't want to live in or something I admire."
Mr Dean's opponents also cannot compete with the sense of ownership among the volunteers. In most campaigns, volunteers turn up, are directed to the nearest phone bank or pile of envelopes, and are told to keep to a script.
Campaign Dean is an entirely freewheeling operation. Volunteers turn up to make motivational videos, or punch in computer coding, and the centrepiece of their pitch to voters is the "personal story".
"The most effective strategy is honest dialogue," says Ken Saguin, who helped devise the volunteer strategy. "The content of the story is secondary. We would rather have them just communicate sincerely why they are backing Dean rather than rehashing what is put in their mouths by a paid political professional."
The faithful have been straggling in all week from across the country in a mass migration. Many are from the last reliable strongholds of liberalism in the US, with large contingents from Seattle and the San Francisco area, New York and Washington DC. But there is a sizeable group from President George Bush's home state of Texas, a smattering from Mississippi and the south, and the heartlanders such as Ms Haas from Ohio, Illinois and the states adjoining Iowa.
Freak show
On local television, an attack advert paid for by a Republican supporter has an elderly couple running down the Dean volunteers as alien sophisticates: a leftwing, latte-swilling, Volvo-driving, Hollywood-loving freak show.
But in the Perfect Storm headquarters, the Dean supporters look a lot less exotic. Although Dean strategists say his strength derives from his ability to recruit brand new voters into the political process, the majority of the volunteers seem to be in their 30s, 40s or 50s.
The college students are there as well, along with the newly graduated, but this is overwhelmingly a mid-career, professional crowd. They see themselves as reformers - the vanguard of a revolt against what they say is the sheer blandness of American public life, the carefully processed statements from air-brushed politicians, and the politeness of the Democratic establishment.
Mr Dean, they say, has passion. "I really admired the fact that he staked out some real positions on some controversial issues quite unblinkingly - no waffling," says Chris Finnie. Over the years, Ms Finnie, 53, has voted Republican and Democrat, but never with much enthusiasm. "For 30 years, I walked in a voting booth. I held my nose, and I voted for the guy most likely to beat the most offensive candidate," she says.
That passion has resonated with Democrats, who have grown frustrated with the centrist strategy of the party political establishment. They are itching for a Democratic leader to take on Mr Bush directly - not only on the war with Iraq, but on all issues.
"Moderation is not working any more, and it doesn't seem as if any of the other candidates realise that," says Eric Elliott, a newly unemployed dotcommer from California who spent three days on the road to get here. Many of the volunteers are motivated by anger - although anger is a word that annoys Dean supporters because they say it makes them sound irrational. But it is not entirely clear why they are angry. There is the conservative Christian ascendancy, the swelling deficit under President Bush, the tax cuts for the rich, and Al Gore's failure to become president despite winning the popular vote in the 2000 election. Several of the volunteers barely mention the Iraq war as their reason for backing Mr Dean - although he is viewed as the anti-war candidate.
Instead, theirs is a more generalised discontent. It found an outlet in Mr Dean and it transformed the former governor from Vermont from an outsider - dismissed by the US media and pollsters - into a contender.
Last month, Mr Dean achieved a commanding lead in fundraising and in the opinion polls. But some of his supporters in Iowa detect worrying signs of change in him. Is he softening his punches? Is he going to turn into a centrist? "I think he got reined in," says Helena Johnson, 25, from Washington DC.
Part of Mr Dean's intermittent displays of caution are self-preservation. He has come under constant attack from his opponents and under relentless scrutiny from the press, which exposed the dangers of his frank speaking style. Now, with two of Mr Dean's opponents - Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards - moving upwards, the plain talker has grown circumspect.
All of this makes the storm chasers nervous. It also makes their mission much more crucial to Mr Dean's success.
Traditionally, turnout is low at the Iowa caucuses. Instead of swiftly casting a vote, participants must give up an evening, and make their choice in public. In the 2000 Democratic primaries, only 60,000 Iowans bothered to attend local caucuses.
Mr Dean's strategists are counting on bringing out twice that number - 125,000 caucus-goers - but they need the volunteers to do that. By the time they arrive in Iowa, most of the Perfect Storm people have spent months thinking about Howard Dean. They have gone to meetings and written letters. They may have spoken to his campaign manager in a conference call. The only thing left was to get to Iowa and tell their personal stories.
Andrew Homan's personal story goes like this. He is 23 and works two part-time jobs in a small town in Indiana. It cost him $500 (£278) for a rental car and food, and by the time his lost earnings are taken into account, the trip to Iowa will have cost him two weeks' pay. His colleagues told him he was crazy.
After getting lost for an hour in the north-western suburbs of Des Moines the other day, he was deposited in a neighbourhood of comfortable looking homes. He had to knock on several doors before he found someone at home. And she was a committed Republican.
Mr Homan finds it hard to contain his enthusiasm, and he can't understand others who do not share his views.
"I voted for Gore but at the time I wasn't so opposed to Bush. I thought his father was a decent president," he says. "Bush has done so many things wrong on so many levels. I couldn't not get involved." |
