Running for president is a body-and-soul-challenging job. Campaigns
begin years before the election, and candidates are caught in an endless race
around the country, repeating the same phrases and self-congratulatory
arguments as they fight to out-fundraise and out-spend one another. It was therefore
no surprise that, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in January 2004, Howard Dean
looked a bit squeezed out on the campaign trail.
After more than a decade as Vermont Governor he was running for
president as a feisty outsider, challenging the Bush administration about the
conduct of the Iraq War while riding an Internet-driven wave of anti-incumbent
anger.
In spite of Vermont’s often prickly relationship with the national
government, other politicians from the Green Mountains had contemplated running
after the unexpected presidential terms of Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge.
In 1881 Arthur became president after James Garfield was shot at a Washington
railway station by an unstable officer-seeker. Coolidge served for five years
after Warren Harding dropped dead in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, in the
midst of a goodwill tour.
 |
| Phil Hoff broke through 1962. |
In the late 1930s Republican George Aiken, a former Vermont governor
and US Senator, toyed with the possibility of challenging Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. Thirty years later Phil Hoff leapt into the national spotlight
briefly as the first Democratic governor to break with President Lyndon Johnson
over the Vietnam War. In summer 1968, Hoff galvanized the party with a moving
speech to the General Assembly eulogizing Robert Kennedy, who had been
assassinated in June. When the Democrats gathered in Chicago, Hoff’s name circulated
as a “protest” candidate for vice president. But he was conflicted and worn
down by a decade of political struggles and did not pursue it.
Howard Dean had fewer internal conflicts. The son of a Republican Wall
Street executive, he grew up in affluent surroundings, mostly in East Hampton,
and attended an exclusive boarding school. At Yale he opposed the Vietnam War
but wasn’t a protester, then drifted for a while before briefly becoming a
stockbroker. That didn’t satisfy a nagging desire to help people, however, so
he enrolled at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a school in the Bronx
famous for its community-based approach.
Once he completed med school, the next challenge was finding a place
for his residency. Vermont was not his first choice, but its size offered a way
to combine practicing medicine with political engagement. His first significant
move was to help launch the Citizens’ Waterfront Group, which fought for a bike
path along the shore on Lake Champlain and locked horns with the administration
of Bernie Sanders, an Independent who had unseated a Democratic mayor.
The bike path campaign took years but ultimately succeeded beyond his dreams. In the meantime, Dean
learned the ropes from established Vermont politicians. “They shaped me into a
pragmatic Democrat,” he wrote in a political autobiography. “I was friendly
with the younger, more liberal Democrats because they were my age, but I didn’t
vote with them. I didn’t relate to their political sensibilities.”
By 1982 he was chairing the Chittenden County Democratic Committee and
running for the state House of Representatives. “The District was in
Burlington, and it was the most liberal, working-class district in the state,”
he wrote. “There was a very strong Progressive Party in the ward and no
Republican Party whatsoever. So, interestingly, I ended up running against a
candidate to my left in my first election.”
In the legislature Dean joined a group of young, moderate Democrats and
Republicans known as the “blue shirts,” focused on education issues, and became
minority leader in only two years. By 1986 he was ready to run statewide.
Looking at the available options – lieutenant governor or a race for Congress
against moderate Republican Jim Jeffords – he chose the easier path. Fortunately for
Dean, the current lieutenant governor, Peter Smith, wanted to run for
governor.
In 1990, Dean passed on the opportunity to run for governor himself, but
ended up in office anyway due to the sudden death of Richard Snelling. Reviewing his
accomplishments over the next decade, Dean has stressed balancing the budget,
building a surplus, land conservation, health care for most children
under 18, and an early intervention program that reduced childhood abuse. On some
issues he resisted demands from the left, however, and was generally known as a
centrist.
His response to calls for same-sex marriage was indicative. On December
10, 1999 the State Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Vermont, that gay couples
had a right to the same benefits provided to straight couples and told the
legislature to deal with appropriate implementation. Sensing political peril,
Dean initially expressed some discomfort with the idea of gay marriage. But the
legislature moved forward and made Vermont the first state to legalize civil
unions. Dean signed the bill, but without a public ceremony, apparently in the
hope of cooling down the atmosphere. It didn’t happen. Gay rights activists
felt cheated, and an anti-gay backlash almost cost him re-election in 2000.
In retrospect, Dean asserts that he was committed to marriage equality
for all. “That’s why I knew I had to work for civil unions,” he wrote in 2003,
in the midst of his presidential race. “I never viewed the bill as a gay rights
issue. I signed it out of a commitment to human rights, and because every
single American has the same right to equality and justice under the law that I
have.” Whatever the reasons, he benefited in the long run. Wealthy gay
supporters, especially in the Fire Island beach community, were early and
generous contributors to his campaign.
By the time civil unions became Vermont law in 2000, Dean was already
considering a presidential race. But he passed on it that year, and waited
until the end of his last term as governor two year later to begin building an
organization. He also made sure Al Gore wasn’t running again.
Early on, Dean tapped into an Internet-based strategy, meetups, and
used the concept to organize supporters across the country. “We were seeing a
phenomenon where the effort was owned and directed by the people who supported
it,” he explained. He was also discovering a new way to raise money. By June
30, 2003, he had raised almost $8 million, beating his rivals and advancing to
the top candidate tier. A week before that, he officially announced in front of
a standing room only crowd on Church Street.
“On that stunning early summer day,” he recalled, “I stood in front of
more than thirty thousand Americans who had gathered in Burlington and, via the
Internet, across the country…In many ways, that speech on June 23 was the
culmination of what I had learned in a year of listening to the American
people.”
 |
| Dean campaign lit, 2004 |
By August Dean was the hottest political story in the country, the wild
card of the upcoming presidential race. In cover features published simultaneously
on August 11, both Time and Newsweek declared him the candidate to watch. Time
was circumspect, titling its cover “The Dean Factor” and inside headlining his
“cool passion” as an “unlikely spokesman for the anti-Bush left.” Newsweek was
more provocative. Dean pointed angrily at an unseen audience as the cover headline
asked, “Howard Dean: Destiny or Disaster?” Inside, Jonathan Alter’s coverage
telegraphed the fear among establishment Democrats that “if Dean does win the
nomination, his liberal supporters will put their Birkenstocks on the gas pedal
and drive the party right over the cliff, a la George McGovern in 1972.”
Back in Vermont, many residents were perplexed. This was a new Howard
Dean, no longer the moderate who often frustrated progressives. Now he was, as
Alter described him, “the fire-breathing neopopulist” calling on liberals to
“Take your country back.”
In Dean’s book, released a few months later, he chided fellow Democrats
for “actually empowering the radical right” by being afraid to “stand up to the
Republicans and their radical agenda.” He defined his cause as “the Great
American Restoration – the restoration of our ideals, of our communities, and
of our nation’s traditional role as a beacon of hope in the world.” Dean had
become governor by accident, but was running for president with gusto and
purpose.
Six months later, on the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, he was still
pushing as hard, and pulling out the stops by spending Sunday morning with
President Carter in Georgia. Then he flew back to caucus-land for a rare
appearance with his wife. He had focused on Iowa early, risking $300,000 to air
the first TV ads. Everything looked set for an early victory.
But groups like the Club for Growth had something else in mind. In
early 2004, the Club came up with a strategy designed to turn what was starting
to look like a Frank Capra movie, Dr. Dean Goes to Washington, into a
horror-fantasy. In an ad released by the conservative anti-tax group shortly
before the crucial caucuses, two actors, playing an elderly couple, were asked
to describe the threat looming over the country.
Responding directly to the camera, the “husband” said, “Howard Dean
should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating,
Volvo-driving, New York Times reading…” Then the “wife” jumped in with,
“body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it
belongs.”
It was strong stuff, a perverse yet brilliant blend of dark comedy and
cultural hate speech, so effective that the Club didn’t have to pay much for airtime.
The news networks were more than willing to provide free play. As CNN’s Judy
Woodruff explained on January 9, “This is so catchy, we love to run it over and
over again.”
Club for Growth President Steve Moore readily admitted that the goal
was to re-brand Dean as a tax-hiking elitist. The theme would have been
developed more if he had become the nominee, and was cleverly recycled in 2008
to fit Obama. Columnist Austin Bay outlined the script in a mid-January 2004
essay, arguing that Dean was the candidate of “that cadre of angry American
leftists struggling with a nasty case of '60s nostalgia and their failed
elitist ideology.” In this version of the race, narcissist baby boom radicals
were using “pop socialism” to extend “government coercion.”
“These ‘progressives’ wish America were France,” Bay wrote. “Whether
tenured in the Ivies, ensconced in editorial positions or pulling in trial
lawyer and Hollywood bucks, these late middle-age Volvo drivers long for L'Age
D'Or, when smoking dope and calling US soldiers babykillers made you
‘hip’." Calling the idea that the US war on Iraq might have been a mistake
another sign of “tie-dyed dogma,” he concluded that the Dean campaign was
dangerous “brain-zapped foolishness.”
Dean endured similar assaults throughout his campaign, and not just
from other candidates and isolated columnists. In addition to a barrage of
negative campaign ads directed against the frontrunner, a majority of nightly
network newscast evaluations of Dean were negative, while three-quarters of the
coverage given to the other candidates was favorable, according to research
conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. In 2003, only 49 percent
of all on-air evaluations of Dean were positive, while the rest of the
democratic field collectively received 78 percent favorable.
By January 19, 2004, most of the candidates were ready to say and do
anything to survive. A few hours before the caucuses, John Kerry wondered aloud
whether John Edwards was “out of diapers” when he (Kerry) came back from
Vietnam. He had to apologize, since Edwards was 16 at the time. In frigid
weather, steelworkers were showing painted chests for Dick Gephardt. Wesley
Clark, not in the caucus but gaining ground nationally at the time, was hugging
George McGovern in New Hampshire. Edwards and Dennis Kucinich meanwhile struck
a deal to pool delegates. Treating caucus-goers like tradable commodity, they
agreed that the candidate with the best early showing in a caucus would get the
other’s support to meet the 15 percent viability threshold for actual delegates.
In a weird counterpoint, the Bush administration was pushing for
caucuses in Iraq. As the US tried to get the UN back into the process of
reconstructing the devastated country, thousands of angry Shiites were taking
to the streets. Their demand was free elections, but their leaders admitted
that the goal was an Islamic state. The fear was that a public vote, being
demanded by the Shiite majority, would lead to a less-than-friendly government.
The subtext was that caucuses made it easier to manipulate the outcome.
CNN analysts issued a forecast for Iowa hours before anyone voted. On Crossfire,
Democratic insiders Paul Begala and James Carville, as well as conservative
Robert Novak, predicted that Kerry’s late surge would overwhelm Dean. Edwards
was given third place and Gephardt was consigned to oblivion. Dean sounded
over-confident, but there was uncertainty among his active supporters,
nicknamed the Deaniacs. Volunteers in at least three cities were handing out
flyers that charged Kerry wasn’t electable, his wife was too rich, and Ralph
Nader wouldn’t step aside if he was the nominee. It came across as desperate.
Days earlier, Dean Campaign Director Joe Trippi had claimed to have
40,000 definite supporters lined up to attend the caucuses, virtually
guaranteeing first place. (He was off by half.) Over the weekend, volunteers
flooded the state, buzzing around in orange hats. It would be a test of whether
“Generation Dean” was for real. For the candidate, it was a reality check on a
dream that dated back years.
Waiting for the numbers, Tom Brokaw noted that politics today is about
cultural values, and that Dean’s message had become confused – he was an “outsider”
with more key endorsements than anyone else, an angry guy whose wife didn’t
want much to do with his campaign. In short, an uncertain image had undermined
his message and, more important, his perceived electability. According to a
focus group led by Frank Luntz, Dean’s support had tanked, largely because
people found him testy, even mean – partially based on a last minute shouting
match with a critic that made Iowa TV news.
Kerry and Edwards were staging an upset. But Dean had also squandered
his lead, and too many questions were being raised about his electability, key
factors apparently favoring Kerry and Edwards. Early opposition to the Iraq war
didn’t turn out to be a strong enough argument; both anti-war and young Iowans
found Kerry as attractive as the former Vermont governor.
Nevertheless, becoming the frontrunner had already allowed Dean to
launch and fund a national campaign. Thus, losing in Iowa didn’t necessarily have
to spell doom. But it did allow the media to question his claims to be leading
a broad-based movement, and set the stage for Kerry to beat him in New
Hampshire. Even spending millions more on TV ads wouldn’t be enough to overcome
another month like the last.
And then, when he could have been hopeful but humble, Howard Dean went
on national TV to thank his supporters and unexpectedly turned into a cartoon
character, a snarling Hulk who rasped out a fierce determination to beat any rivals,
shouting out their home states with a frightening sneer. Columnist Howard
Fineman was generous when he called it “a little nutty.” CNN’s senior analyst
Bill Schneider concluded that “people looked at Howard Dean, and they didn’t
see a President.”
Boston’s Mike Barnacle was blunt: “That guy’s not going to the White
House.”
 |
| Can a Vermonter make it? Bernie Sanders may try next. |
Bush strategist Karl Rove and the religious Right wanted the 2004 presidential
race to be about values – things like patriotism, optimism and heterosexual
marriage. Actually, they hoped to convince enough people to swallow the
administration line, ignore uncomfortable facts, and embrace an
evangelically-infused 1950s vision of the country. But the election ended up
being about much more, including security, deception, gay marriage, decency,
and the all-important presidential variable known as “likeability.”
Howard Dean’s incandescent sprint became a warning: Be prepared for the
unexpected. By winning the so-called “invisible primary” – the fundraising and
organization-building race that happens before any votes are cast – he looked
like a “frontrunner” quite early, probably too soon. In the end his support
turned out to be demographically thin and easy to undermine. In early 2004 he
went from “hot” to “not” in less than a month.
Like the outbursts of Barack Obama’s former minister Jeremiah Wright in
2008, Dean’s so-called “rant” after the Iowa caucuses – instantly infamous as
the “I have a scream” speech – was the hot clip on TV and the Internet for
weeks, the focus of endless late night jokes. Within five days, the “scream
heard round the world” was played almost 700 times on US television networks.
As Dean’s poll numbers tanked, critics concluded that he simply didn’t have the
“temperament” to be president. The emphasis shifted from which candidate had
the most compelling message to which would be more “electable.” Dean was being
winnowed out.
Struggling to turn disaster into opportunity, the embattled candidate
spent the next days blanketing the networks with interviews, appearing with his
wife, joking about his performance on late night TV, even distributing video
tapes of a warm and fuzzy interview with Diane Sawyer to more than 100,000 New
Hampshire residents. It began to work.
Some people realized that the criticisms of Dean were exaggerated.
But Kerry seized the moment to step above the fray, stressing his
“gravitas” and showcasing manly skills by playing Hockey and piloting a
helicopter. Like a contender on the reality show Survivor, he was showcasing
his value to the tribe. The following Tuesday, when New Hampshire primary votes
were tallied, the strategy paid off. Kerry repeated his Iowa performance,
pulling in 39 percent. Dean made a partial comeback with a convincing second
place finish. His speech that night was more sedate, yet still defiant.
The immediate casualties were Wesley Clark, who skipped Iowa to spend
weeks alone in New Hampshire – only to come in a weak third, and Joe Lieberman,
stuck in fifth with less than 10 percent after virtually living in the state for
a month and bragging about “Joe-mentum.” Neither immediately gave up but both
were on the critical list.
On February 18, after coming in third in Wisconsin, Dean finally acknowledged
that his campaign had "come to an end." Yet he urged people to
continue voting for him. The idea was that Dean delegates could still influence
the party platform. On March 2 he won the Vermont primary, but it was over.
After the 2004 election Dean became chairman of the Democratic National
Committee, creating a “50 State Strategy” designed to make Democrat
congressional candidates competitive in normally conservative states. The approach bore fruit in the 2006 midterms;
Democrats took back the House and picked up seats in the Senate from normally
Republican states. In 2008 Barack Obama made Dean’s strategy the backbone of
his campaign.
On April 7, 2009, over a veto from Dean’s gubernatorial successor Jim
Douglas, the Vermont legislature became the first in the country to allow
marriage for same-sex couples. An UCLU
study concluded that the decision would boost the state’s economy by more than
$30 million over three years, and that, in turn, would generate $3.3 million
more in fees and sales taxes and create 700 new jobs.
After Dean dropped out of the presidential race, some analysts said he
had been assassinated by a hostile media. It was partly true. But they couldn’t
have done it if Dean hadn’t supplied some bullets. Throughout the campaign he
insisted on shooting from the hip and often fell into gaffes. Another notion,
that his campaign had fundamentally changed the Democratic Party, took much for
granted. It was about as convincing as the assumption that Ralph Nader’s
presence in the race would broaden public discourse. Nader was refused entry into
major debates, rarely appeared on television, and didn’t make it onto the
ballot in many states.
After 9/111, many people argued that “everything” had changed. Not so. Some things continued as usual, including not-so-subtle manipulation
of public opinion and the primary election process.
