A Pilgrim's Progress
From moderate governor to grassroots rockstar, the reinvention of Howard Dean.
by David White
The Weekly Standard
10/25/2006
ON NOVEMBER 8, 2002, Howard Dean spoke before a lunchtime audience of a few dozen Manhattan elites at the Yale Club of New York City. His speech was stirring, passionate, and candid.
At that point in the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, he was still an enigma. Outside the green hills of Vermont, few Americans had any idea who Dean was--an obscurity reflected in his lack of funds, his staff of one, and the fact that he could walk the streets of Manhattan in complete anonymity. In fact, the only recognizable figure in the Yale Club that afternoon was Barry Scheck, the attorney who gained notoriety in the 1994 murder trial of O.J. Simpson.
By early 2003, of course, all that had changed. The race for the presidency was heating up, the United States was marching into Baghdad, and Dean's candidacy had become synonymous with the anti-war, far-left fringe of the Democratic party.
The Howard Dean of that cold November day, however, hadn't yet become that candidate. Instead, he presented himself as the heir to Bill Clinton, spending most of his time touting his small-state, fiscally-conservative, politically-moderate credentials, and wooing the audience with his plan for healthcare expansion. In retrospect, this sales pitch could have easily been described as "Republican Lite"--a criticism he would later sling at John Kerry, John Edwards, and the rest of Washington's Democrats.
The early Howard Dean also hadn't yet taken up a position against intervention in Iraq. When we sat down to chat after his speech that afternoon, I asked him about U.N. Resolution 1441, which the U.N. Security Council had passed unanimously that morning.
"Do you think the U.N. resolution that was passed today," I asked, "will prevent a war in Iraq?"
"I don't know: that's up to Saddam Hussein," he answered. "We may have to go in unilaterally, and we would be justified in doing so if we can't get rid of him or his likelihood of making atomic weapons." Within a few months Dean and the burgeoning anti-war movement would find each other and realize the political benefits of filling the space left open by serious Democrats, who were, at the time, largely pro-war.
Part of Dean's appeal is what his supporters tout as his brutal honesty. But upon closer inspection, he is actually a politician who has--in a calculated way--mastered the art of appearing to speak without thinking. After all, while his words and actions have elevated Dean to the position of national party chairman, they've driven the Democrats closer and closer to the fringe at a time when electoral success is finally within their grasp.
An Accidental Rise to Power
In many ways, Dean's political ascension can be traced to his days at Yale, where, like George W. Bush, he wasn't known for his political activism. In a 2003 interview with the Yale Daily News, for example, one classmate said, "After a [college] mixer or party, if there was a keg of beer left over it would end up in Howard's entryway and the party would continue." While at Yale, Dean dramatically resigned from a campus fraternity after a dispute over a coffee bar. Years later, after settling in Vermont, Dean would have a similar falling out with the Episcopal Church.
In 1980, shortly after moving to Shelburne--a small town next to Burlington on the shores of Lake Champlain--Dean helped establish the Citizens Waterfront Group, an organization that sought to preserve and protect Lake Champlain. When developers joined forces with Burlington City Hall, aggressively seeking to build waterfront property, Dean launched a crusade. Hoping to build a 9-mile bike path along the shores of the lake, Dean wouldn't let anything stand in his way--and even left his Episcopal diocese when they considered siding with developers. In Winning Back America, Dean described the crusade as "one of the most important projects I've ever been involved in. . . . [It's] what got me involved in politics in the first place."
With his interest stirred by the bike path dispute and his close friendship with Esther Sorrell (the state coordinator for Jimmy Carter's 1980 presidential run) Dean soon threw himself into Vermont politics, becoming county chair in 1980, a state representative in 1983, and lieutenant governor in 1986. His quick ascension--even by his own accounts--was largely because he shunned political decorum and embraced audaciousness, earning the nickname "Ho Ho" from Vermont's legislators. But his actions worked and he managed to keep enough friends along the way. All the while, because Vermont's lieutenant governor has so few responsibilities, he maintained his life as a doctor.
Late one August afternoon in 1991, Dean received an urgent phone call from Montpelier while performing a routine medical exam on a patient. The call was to inform him that the
Republican governor, Richard Snelling, had died of a heart attack. Suddenly, Dean was Vermont's new governor.
Considering that Dean worked as a Democratic activist throughout the early 1980s and was a trustworthy liberal while in Vermont's legislature, most people assumed that he would govern from the left. But from the start, he was different. He kept Snelling's Republican staff and policies in place, opposed the extension of a temporary income tax increase, fought against new taxes, and advocated balanced budgets and pragmatism.
"With Snelling's death," explained John McClaughry, who challenged Dean for Vermont's governorship in 1992, "we suddenly got 'Howard Dean the crypto-Republican.' He keeps the Republican cabinet, the Republican spending plan, and says no new income taxes. What could we run on?"
Despite a strong desire to greatly expand Vermont's government-sponsored healthcare (it failed in the state legislature), his economic policies earned high grades from the libertarian Cato Institute and, in 1996, Dean was invited to a roundtable luncheon at the think tank. According to the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore, who was, at the time, a senior fellow at Cato, Dean won over the audience. "Believe me," Dean said in his remarks, "I'm no big-government liberal. I believe in balanced budgets, markets, and deregulation. Look at my record in Vermont."
"In retrospect, who knows if that was the real Howard Dean," recalls Moore. "After all, in the political climate of the late 1990s, maybe a fiscally-conservative political moderate was simply what the market demanded. Clinton was popular, so Dean wanted to emulate him."
But his popularity stemmed from more than just politics. Dean charmed Vermonters with his decidedly informal approach to all things serious--whether it was his cheap suits, his disdain for socializing, or his old Toyota pickup. And he charmed enough of them to become the longest serving governor in the nation. After the conclusion of five two-year terms that he announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination for president.
The Race for the White House
Howard Dean had his quirks--most notably, his quick temper and penchant for socialized medicine--but here was a governor with whom conservatives could get along. After all, Dean kept budgets balanced, taxes low, took umbrage with Vermont's liberals, and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association on eight separate occasions.
So how did that man turn into today's Howard Dean? The answer is two-fold: First, pragmatic opportunism. "If there's one thing that's been entirely consistent with Howard," explained McClaughry, "it's that he's always been ambitious."
In the 2004 primary race, Dean had no natural constituency. Sure, he was great on abortion and the environment, but so was everyone else. Gephardt's lock on labor was unbreakable, and Edwards had the trial lawyers. Lieberman was too conservative from the start, and because the party establishment refused to take Al Sharpton seriously, the black vote was everyone's game. That left the anti-war, grassroots fringe--and none of the top contenders were willing to embrace them. So when Dean came out of Vermont, he became their candidate.
The other half of the equation was the Internet, snatched for Dean by Joe Trippi, the campaign manager who had long played politics from the intersection of grassroots activism and technology. Having worked for the presidential campaigns of Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, and Dick Gephardt (and a number of firms in Silicon Valley), one of Trippi's first actions on behalf of the Dean campaign was a late January 2003 meeting with MeetUp.com, an online service that, according to its website, "helps people find others who share their interest or cause, and form lasting, influential, local community groups that regularly meet face-to-face."
By the end of their brief meeting, Trippi realized that the MeetUp.com model could revolutionize political organizing: Rather than seeking out a candidate's supporters, the candidate's supporters would come to you. This idea fit well with the Dean campaign's overarching strategy, which hit full-tilt a few weeks later at the February 2003 meeting of the Democratic National Committee. At that now famous speech, Dean's anti-Bush, anti-war mantra blossomed.
By the early spring, the Dean campaign was utilizing MeetUp.com to organize gatherings across the country and urged their supporters to blog on the campaign's website. In an October 2003 interview with Gary Wolf of Wired magazine, Dean confessed, "We fell into this by accident. I wish I could tell you we were smart enough to figure this out. But the community taught us. They seized the initiative through MeetUp. They built our organization for us before we had an organization."
"Along comes this campaign to take back the country for ordinary human beings, and the best way you can do that is through the Net," Dean continued. "We listen. We pay attention. If I give a speech and the blog people don't like it, next time I change the speech."
It was a strange way to start a love affair. And what made the match doubly strange was that Dean was never cut out to be the ardent partisan the grassroots craved. He had, after all, supported the first Gulf War and U.S. action in Afghanistan. And, despite his best efforts to claim otherwise, he had also supported the early stages of America's second confrontation with Iraq. He was fiscally-conservative, pro-gun, and pro-death penalty. But once Dean joined the hard Left, there was no turning back.
By November of 2003--only one year after our initial meeting--Dean's MeetUp.com group had secured more than 140,000 members and was holding more than 800 meetings per month. With numbers like these--and fundraising prowess to boot--Dean was soon receiving the endorsements not only of the nation's most powerful labor unions, but of establishment Democrats, too. By December, these included Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, former Senator Bill Bradley, and Al Gore.
But behind the scenes, Dean's campaign was imploding. By October 2003, according to Newsweek's 2004 election post-mortem, "Dean and Trippi were speaking to each other only when they had to, and Trippi was threatening to quit." By the end of that year, in a phenomenally irresponsible use of funds, the Dean camp had burned through all but $8.5 million of the record $41 million they had raised.
Dean's campaign was simultaneously crumbling and reaching its zenith. And at the same time, Kerry's camp was finally getting its act together. In November, Kerry fired campaign manager Jim Jordan and brought on Mary Beth Cahill, Ted Kennedy's pragmatic chief of staff. He began taking a decidedly more forceful tone, challenging Bush to "Bring it on" and unveiling himself as the "Real Deal."
The party establishment had begun to rally behind Kerry as the more "electable" choice. Making matters worse for Dean, Kerry mortgaged his home in Beacon Hill--illustrating his willingness to self-finance with the Heinz family fortune.
Kerry won the Iowa caucuses handedly. With his dreams of the presidency already shattered, Dean's infamous primal scream hardly even mattered.
Seeking the DNC
When Dean officially announced the end of his campaign on February 18, 2004, he pledged to continue his "effort to transform the Democratic party and to change [the] country." In March 2004, he founded Democracy for America, a political action committee dedicated to supporting liberal candidates at all levels of government, "from school board to the presidency." And once Bush defeated Kerry, Dean set his sights higher--aiming to chair the Democratic National Committee.
From the start, Dean faced an uphill battle--many Washington Democrats dreaded handing him the reins. But once Iowa governor Tom Vilsack announced that he wouldn't seek the chairmanship, Dean gave the chairman's race the focal point it had lacked. He wined and dined the party establishment pledging a "vibrant, forward-thinking, long-term presence in every single state" and a willingness to "contest every race at every level." By February 2005, Dean secured the chairmanship.
As Stephen Moore points out, "Dean's election to the chairmanship was like a big, gift-wrapped present for the Republicans." "Since he got famous by becoming the mouthpiece of the radical Left," explained John McClaughry, "he wasn't going to say goodbye to them and turn into a stockbroker again. So he set out to do what he does best, which is rouse the rabble."
Sadly for those Democrats who believe that victory lies with the nation's moderate voters, Chairman Dean is exactly what the party doesn't need. "The Democrats are easily within striking distance of winning any presidential election or winning back majorities in the House or the Senate," explains John Fortier, a weekly columnist for the Hill newspaper, who researches politics at the American Enterprise Institute. "But with that said, I think they'd be wise to take some of the prescriptions of centrist organizations, find pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, and talk about the war. The average voter is very skeptical about the war in Iraq, and the Democrats can certainly capitalize on that. But they're not going to do so by offering themselves as pacifists or looking to cut and run."
On the other hand, depending upon how you define his duties, Dean has had some success. "Chairman Dean has a vision for changing the way the DNC does politics, and it's not any different than the vision he put in place while running for president," explains Dean's press secretary, Joshua Earnest. "As an institution, he believes that the DNC needs to be focused on restoring power at the grassroots level. This means focusing our resources, and our attention, on people at the grassroots level in order to build up the Democratic party from the grassroots level."
That's a lot of grassroots. And empowering it is exactly what Dean has done. The DNC now employs activists in nearly every state, Dean spends most of his time traveling, and party's fundraising competence has improved markedly, significantly narrowing the gap with the RNC.
But because of the grassroots focus, most of that money has already been spent. In fact, the Republican National Committee is expected to spend its entire bank account--$60 million or more--mounting a massive advertising blitz before the midterm elections, outspending the Democrats at a rate of 5-to-1. The DNC is at such a disadvantage because it spent most of its cash organizing state parties in the reddest of states. Dean's spending strategy prompted Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel to tell the New Yorker earlier this year that, "If you think that Mississippi and Ohio are the same thing, you're an idiot."
But Dean may not actually care about the difference between Ohio and Mississippi. What he cares about is the grassroots. It was the focus of Dean's presidential campaign, it is the focus of Dean's DNC, and it came up time and again in conversations with DNC staff. And for the Dean camp, the obsession with the grassroots comes at the expense of moderate voters. After all, when mainstream Americans hear "grassroots," they think of partisan activists.
The irony, of course, is that the Howard Dean who no longer exists--the plainspoken, small-state, fiscally-conservative, political moderate--is what the Democratic party desperately needs. A strategy which caters to the fringe may win an election here and there, but it is not a path to long-term political prosperity.
Then again, Dean has a position that most politicians would envy. Most hardcore Democrats love the guy. And at the grassroots level, so do most Republicans.
David White is a writer in Washington.
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