This entry is perhaps not the best, clearest, explanation of how I feel. But raw feelings, really, are as important in politics as cold rational reasoning, and I've decided to leave it as is.
Still, it also seems important to lay out some more serious, clinical thoughts. So read on, with the provisio that what follows is a little despondent, although better organized than before.
I'm writing this more or less without the use of my index finger, because I foolishly sliced it with a sharp knife while making lunch. Fingers bleed a lot, which was irritating. Anyway, here we go:
The Rise & Fall of Howard Dean:
Opportunity Lost
I discovered Howard Dean way back in April of 2003. I was at those first early Meetups, when we all felt a little silly for coming to sit in a coffee shop and talk about a governor from New England that no one had ever heard of.
Over the next nine months, the thing grew like none of us could have predicted. Our local Meetup outgrew venue after venue. We attracted people young and old, and it turned out they were concerned about a lot of the same things.
And the Dean campaign matched our growth stride for stride. We watched Dean go from a statistical hiccup, a small-state governor whose opposition to the war made him supposedly unelectable, to a dynamic, serious Presidential candidate who we believed had the potential not only to be elected, but to change our nation.
Looking back on it, I understand why we were surprised. We, along with most of the United States of America, had forgotten that politics, after all the television and speeches and corporate donations, is ultimately about people. Dean's events, his fundraising, the Meetups, were all components of the fundamental genuis that propelled his campaign: while the rest of the field was treating American voters like consumers, Dean was treating them like participants. The Dean message was attacked for being too angry, too combative, but Dean supporters realized it was ultimately hopeful: yes, it is possible for average citizens to effect change, to build a better world. We were organizing, phonebanking, writing letters, and canvassing because we believed in Dean, but also because we believed in that ideal.
I wrote this entry way back in October. My prediction, unsurprisingly, was that Dean would win the nomination, and I still stand by most of my reasoning. After all, up until late January, it was looking like prophecy. Dean had stolen AFSCME and SEIU away from Gephardt, and Dean's narrow lead in Iowa meant that Geppy might shortly have to drop out.
With respect to Edwards, Clark and Lieberman, I think I was on target as well. Lieberman dropped out early; Clark did indeed "break late," but winning Oklahoma wasn't enough to save his candidacy. And with Kerry looking more and more dead all the time, I felt confident in my analysis.
But something freakish happened, and Dean finished third in Iowa (I'll get to that in a minute.) My predictions remain more or less accurate, with one simple change: Kerry took Dean's place. By winning Iowa and New Hampshire, he put Dean in essentially the same desperate place that my predictions put Kerry in.
A lot of people have wasted a lot of ink and pixels explaining that one, and I don't feel like I need to rehash it all here. Briefly, I think Dean and Gephardt's negative ads hurt them; disproportionatley so, because new laws require the ads to include a verbal approval of the ad by the candidate. In an electorate looking above all for a way to beat Bush, Democrats tearing each other down didn't look very good.
There's another important theory, and it has to do with the national media. This theory goes back to Dean's statements about large media conglomeratees: in short, he thought they should be broken up, their market share limited. The theory holds that the media essentially went after Dean for these statements, and that he lost Iowa for that reason.
I've refrained in large part from buying into this theory. Honestly, I think that it's mostly because I don't want to believe it. But enough people, not only citizens but members of the media, are starting to support it that it seems important to at least mention. Of late, The Nation's William Greider has summed it up the best:
In forty years of observing presidential contests, I cannot remember another major candidate brutalized so intensely by the media, with the possible exception of George Wallace... reporters, as surrogate agents for Washington's insider sensibilities, blew him off. Dean's big mistake was in not recognizing, up front, that the media are very much part of the existing order and were bound to be hostile to his provocative kind of politics. To be heard, clearly and accurately, he would have had to find another channel.
Greider is understandably unable to name names, but goes on to explain in a more detail the reaction of the press to Dean. If true (and I have no concrete reason to believe that it is or, more importantly, that it is not), then it's a disheartening indicator of just how hard it will really be to seriously change things in this country.
If you poke around the Internet, and in a few places on television and in the print media, you can find people citing examples of anti-Dean bias. For quite a while Nedra Pickler (one of the AP's Dean reporters) was singled out; her writing was dissected mercilessly (she had a couple websites devoted to her.) I dismissed a lot of what was seen as bias as the incidental things that can really be found in all journalism if one looks hard enough, but maybe it's worth revisiting.
But fuck that, at least for now. The subhead of this piece is Opportunity Lost, and I'm going to take a stab at explaining exactly what that opporunity was with a few Dean quotes that you probably haven't heard before:
The reason people don't vote in this country is that we don't give them a reason to vote. This campaign is about giving all of you a reason to vote.
In our nation, the people are sovereign, not the government. It is the people, not the media or the financial system or mega-corporations or the two political parties, who have the power to create change.
As long as half the world's population subsists on less than two dollars a day, the US will not be secure.... A world populated by 'hostile have-nots' is not one in which US leadership can be sustained without coercion.
Dean had not liberal, but truly sensible and revolutionary ideas. He advocated instant runoff voting. Full disclosure in financial reporting. Measures like sponsored public broadcasting and national tax breaks for political contributions by low-income individuals that would have done much to increase involvement. Dean once said (and I paraphrase) that considered on their merits, the Democratic platform beat the Republican platform every time. Dean's goal, I think, was in large part to equip the American public to compare them.
Forget for a moment that I'm quoting Chris Matthews, because he's encapsulated the Dean campaign with fantastic eloquence (for him, anyway):
Say this for Howard Dean, the five-time governor of Vermont, he took a stand that the occupation of Iraq was wrong with American history and wrong with—for America's future. He asked Americans to say so...
I know a lot of people disagree with Dean's tough position, but somewhat smaller numbers still do. They had their say; he's gone from the race. The people I want to talk to here and now are those whose hearts once soared at the very notion of this man, this former governor from one of the original 13 colonies, showing all the passion and ideals of an early American revolutionary, a real Green Mountain boy come out of the Vermont hills to fight the good fight. To those who joined Dean's rebel cause, I salute you. From the time of Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine and, yes, John Brown, and Martin Luther King, the people who have moved this country have not been those marching to the American band, but those gutsy few out ahead. You Dean kids of all ages can now take your place in that proud tradition. You can tell your kids that you were with Dean.
How a frank, honest, and basically conservative governor from a state that ought to be considered a part of the American political heartland came to be a Presidential front-runner, and lost that status just as quickly, is a question that's not going to be answered here. There are years and years, and a lot more ink and pixels, that will provide those answers.
The point here is that we lost an opportunity. We could have elected the first Presidential politician since Kennedy with the potential to change, positively and permanently, the American political system. The point is also this, if for no other reason than that the alternative is too horrible to contemplate:
We have the power to join together and be a force for change, proving that economic power and political corruption are no match for the people standing up to take back their country.
Howard Dean said that.
Posted by slade at February 24, 2004 01:46 AM