Howard Deans campaign for president depends on obstinacy. Damn the polls. Damn the trends. Damn conventional wisdom.
Here’s a guy planning to wage what amounts to a straight-talkin’ populist campaign when the “People vs. Powerful” theme has supposedly gone the way of parachute pants. He promises balanced budgets at the same time he opposed war in Iraq. He cites a record that protects gun rights and gay rights.
So far, this unlikely mix is working nationally, where Dean has pulled even with front-running US Senator John Kerry in New Hampshire polls. The rest of the top candidates, meanwhile, are saddled with having given President Bush a blank check for action against Saddam Hussein last fall while half their party opposed the war.
But Dean’s ascendancy means more than just Iraq. He has tapped into a vein of frustration the faithful feel toward a party seemingly scared of the president’s popularity, preoccupied with middle class tax cuts and terminally afraid of being cast as liberals or class warriors — call it the Lieberman Syndrome.
Ask a Carolina Democrat about this approach and he might say, “Damn right, we’re scared.” After all, they watched their squeaky clean former White House chief of staff do everything but claim he was the Tweedle-Dum to George Bush’s Tweedle-Dee last November, and he still got clobbered. And yet this Dean thinks he’s going to take Southern states talking about universal health care, the environment and why America was wrong to invade Iraq without getting the go-ahead from Kofi Annan?
Such is the confidence — bordering on hubris — of a candidate who has never lost an election. In Erskine Bowles’ failure, Dean sees the way to success: Be aggressive, offer a plainspoken vision and the public will come with you. That’s one of the reasons this little-known governor from a state of only 600,000 or so people has turned just about every recent Democratic confab into a Church of Dean revival and why he can win his party’s nomination.
But it will take more than shooting from the hip in the South. Dean must find new voters and nonvoters, groups heavy with the young and minorities while holding some piece of the largely white center. And he’ll have to do it on a scale that Clinton never did. It borders on unprecedented.
Of course, one might think Dean’s timing couldn’t be better. More than two million Americans have lost their jobs since Bush came to power. Real wages are down, and the government faces the largest budget deficit in its history. More than 40 million Americans lack health insurance.
Many economists argue that if the economy fails to turn around this quarter, it is unlikely to add significant jobs before fall 2004. The flipside for Bush is that if his budget is passed as proposed, according to Washington Post columnist David Broder, it will mean $165 billion in cuts to social programs that benefit the poor.
The problem for Dean is that the very tactic that has brought him to prominence nationally stands to muzzle him in the South, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a military base. And party pragmatists suspect Dean’s anti-war rhetoric will make any election a tussle over national security instead of Bush’s domestic troubles.
Dean, a doctor by trade, insists that he wants to compete in the South. And he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Dean injected $32,000 into his campaign in the crucial primary state of South Carolina — more than he spent in any other state — according to his campaign finance report. “There are a lot of people in Georgia who will tend to be conservative on social issues but whose kids don’t have health insurance,” Dean says. “I can do something about that.” The key is constructing a white-black coalition that votes on its economic self-interest, he says.
To make that appeal, Dean, who notes he served as Vermont’s top politician long enough to govern through two Bush recessions — 12 years — relies on hard-nosed rhetoric, a style one probably associates more with Republicans than Democrats.
“It was always “talk to you straight,'” says Peter Freyne, a journalist with Burlington, VT, alternative weekly newspaper Seven Days, who covered Dean for more than 20 years. “He’s not going to be a wimp. He’s not going to coddle you. He’s not afraid to offend you because he wants you to like him.”
The question is whether a campaign that emphasizes the necessity of affirmative action and the right to bear arms can capture both whites and blacks in the Bible belt. Southern political scientists familiar with the region’s likes and dislikes say fat chance.
First, notes Georgia College and State University’s Chris Grant, there is the matter of Dean’s decision to approve Vermont’s civil unions law. That legislation gave the same legal benefits to Vermont’s gay couples that married couples enjoy, and it figures to be exploited by candidates on the right. It might even be used subtly in the primaries where Dean faces two candidates, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, who both voted for the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.
Then, there is the whole idea of forging a newfangled populist coalition of middle- and under-class voters. Emory University political scientist Merle Black ain’t buying it.
“Usually in the South, less than half of the citizens vote, and that non-voting is concentrated among lower income and less-educated citizens, so the groups that would be most receptive to a populist appeal are often not voting,” Black says. “For a modern populist strategy to work, a really increased turnout among lower income or lower middle class voters who might benefit from [federal entitlement] programs, you first have to mobilize individuals who don’t take part in politics. Then you have to make your appeal. [Populist campaigns] can’t win with the given political universe.”
Dean’s appeal must cross racial lines and make a pitch to low-income whites as well as to blacks. There’s a “huge potential for racial cleavage,” Black says. “It’s just very hard to put together that racial coalition today.”
Frances Fox Piven, a political science professor at the City University of New York and author of Why Americans Don’t Vote, says Black is right to suggest it will be difficult for Dean to motivate nonvoters.
“We have a lot of data showing increased skepticism, cynicism about the political system, especially among poor people,” Piven says.
Some of that skepticism, she says, stems from both parties’ failure to address the issues faced by people who aren’t in the boarding school set. The parties primarily seem to concern themselves with the question of who should get the lion’s share of tax cuts. When Democrats play that game, they distance themselves from the very values that separate them from Republicans, values that stress the connectedness of the classes — for example, the effect a cancer-suffering waitress without health insurance has on the HMO rates that a teacher pays, or how the demise of a jobs program increases the likelihood that Banker Bob gets mugged on his way home from work.
Combine that failure to communicate with the campaign tactic debacles Florida 2000 exposed, meaning that “political parties really campaign as much by preventing people from voting as by … drawing them to the polls,” Piven says, and it’s no real surprise that many lower income people don’t get involved.
Still, she cautions, that doesn’t mean the voting base can’t be expanded if campaigns concentrate on grassroots organizing.
“If we had some insurgent candidates who were willing to buck the tide,” it could succeed, Piven says, citing the success of former Minnesota US Sen. Paul Wellstone. “Hard to say whether that could be replicated, but it certainly would be worth trying.”
Dean seems game. For starters, 13,000 of his supporters organized gatherings through Internet matchmaker Meetup.com, and he raised more than $750,000 in Internet contributions during the first quarter. Now, his campaign is encouraging supporters to sign up for a cell-phone program that sends text messages and voicemail about news or time-sensitive events.
“Thus far, he has picked up more support, I believe, on the ground, than the polls will ever indicate, meaning that I think he is picking up activists,” says Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000. “He’s picking up a lot of young people. He’s attracting a lot of new supporters.”
Brazile, who hasn’t yet signed on with a 2004 candidate, first met Dean during Gephardt’s 1988 presidential campaign.
“At the [February Democratic National Committee] meeting, again, Dean connected with several activists, including me, because he said essentially, “This campaign was not about just winning an election. It was about changing America,'” Brazile recalls. “He spoke as an organizer and as a revolutionary, someone who understood that the party had lost control in 2002, and therefore had to develop a new strategy to win elections, as well as recapture the American people.
“Democrats are hungry now for a leader who will stand up for what he or she believes, and Dean fits that equation. Secondly, because of his experience as a governor and also the fact that he is not a congressperson or a senator, he doesn’t speak in Washington tongue, meaning he doesn’t speak out of both sides of his mouth.”
Dean counts on that personal style to meld his coalition. Maybe more than any other issue, civil unions shows his ability to go on the offensive with an apparent weakness.
In 1997, Vermont’s courts took up the issue of whether gay couples should enjoy the same legal rights as straights. Freyne, the Seven Days reporter, says Dean ducked the issue as it wound through the courts.
The day the Supreme Court handed down the decision in December 1999, he looked shaken, Freyne recalls. “My feeling was that he just saw his dreams of the White House break like a pane of glass.” Dean wasn’t sure how to respond, but reporters put it to him: How did Howard Dean feel? “He swallowed. He took a breath and said, “I feel uncomfortable about it just like anybody else.'”
But Dean wound up signing civil-union legislation into law when that position was at 35 percent in the polls. And he was just six months away from an election that would see him don a bulletproof vest at campaign stops because of threats from conservatives. Meanwhile, some gay activists were convinced he didn’t go far enough.
Dean hasn’t proposed a national civil-union bill, but he says he would be in favor of granting federal rights to people from states who have civil-union laws.
Unlike his initial unsteadiness with the idea, when the 54-year-old describes his decision today, it can be a showstopper. In an interview with Creative Loafing editors and writers, Dean halted conversation in the room when he explained his decision.
He made similar remarks in a recent address to California Democrats: “I knew if I was willing to sell out the hopes and dreams of a significant portion of our people, then I had wasted my life in public service.
“Vermont is truly a place where every American is equal in the eyes of the law,” he continued. “I want the president to explain why he believes every American should not be equal in the eyes of the law!”
Dean takes a similar tack on the question of health insurance by stressing the overall savings that would result because the insured would no longer be paying for the healthcare of the uninsured in the form of higher premiums and medical bills.
He’s proposing a piecemeal system rather than the single-payer approach President Clinton proposed. He’d cover people 23 and under by including them in coverage by Medicaid — similar to what he did in Vermont. Folks between 24 and 65 years old who don’t have health insurance would get a patchwork of incentives and subsidies, and the elderly would get a modest prescription drug benefit.
“Now, that health insurance is not going to be as good as what you’d get if you worked for IBM, but it’ll be good enough so that nobody will ever go broke if they get a serious illness,” Dean says of his plan. The former governor estimates the five-year cost of his health plan at $400 billion, about half the cost of Bush’s proposed tax cut over the same period.
On foreign policy, Dean calls for an alternative to Bush’s doctrine of preemptive military action. The mere fact that he has a vision at all is completely out of step with his party, as George Packer notes in January’s Mother Jones: “The Democratic Party has no foreign policy. It hasn’t since Vietnam.” Instead, it’s largely been reduced to maintaining a status quo or criticizing whatever Republican is in office.
The doctor’s prescription is what he calls a Marshall Plan for the Third World. It would, he says, mean ramping up our foreign aid — and not just for blowing up the capitals of other countries or catching terrorists. Instead, the money would be used to promote stability and democratic institutions in the developing world.
“There are two components of defense: one is to have a strong military, which I support,” Dean says. “The other is to develop countries into middle class democracies where women fully participate in the economic and social and political decision-making of that country. Those countries do not harbor groups like Al Qaeda and they don’t go to war with each other.”
It’s time to have a foreign policy, Dean says, so that “when we walk down the streets of the capitals of our friends, we don’t have to worry about watching our backs.”
Somehow, it’s not surprising that Dean cites Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion as his favorite novel. For anyone who has ever read the book, four words probably come to mind: “Never give an inch.” The patriarch in Kesey’s 1964 epic scrawls this admonishment on a painting and hangs it near his newborn son’s bed. It’s a commandment of intransigence, a screw you, to nature, convention and history.Dean clearly runs on this sort of gumption and governed with it, too, as Freyne notes that all of his major battles were with the liberal wing of Vermont’s legislature, often over his obsession with balanced budgets.
It explains statements like this one: “Look, we can’t afford tax cuts right now,” he says. “You can’t balance the budget by continuing to reduce your revenues. Now, look, I’m not going to be elected president by saying we ought to get rid of the tax cut. What I think I can do is get elected president by telling the people the truth, which is “You have a choice. You can have the tax cut or you can have the prescription benefit for Medicare. You can have the tax cut or you can fully fund special education so your local school board can reduce your property taxes. You can have the tax cut or you can have your road budget restored.’
“I think most Americans are going to pick roads, health care and education before they pick the tax cut, because they didn’t get much of the tax cut.”
Recent history says the people who have been doing the voting in America wouldn’t agree. But the people who haven’t been voting might be attracted to Dean’s message, which is what makes his candidacy promising.
“The rugged individualists might have been great 50 years ago,” Dean says. “But even then it didn’t exist, because when something terrible happened in your community, everybody pulled together, and I think that under this president, we have all forgotten that we are all pulling together.”
Dean may be able to pull together a coalition of voters to win some Southern states in a Democratic primary. For a Yankee from a tiny, conspicuously vanilla state, Dean’s already done a decent job of lining up crucial black support in the South. Dean has courted Mayor Shirley Franklin and Atlanta’s political kingmaker and former mayor Maynard Jackson. In South Carolina, David Mack III, the head of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, chairs Dean’s campaign.
“If he’s the first to knock on the door and say I need your help, African-Americans will help him,” Brazile says. “Dean has a good record. He has a wonderful resume, and I think he is talking about issues that resonate well, especially with African-American voters in this country.”
The problem for Dean, especially in the South, is that the very thing that may help him line up critical support in a primary — opposition to war — may make voters in the general election deaf to his domestic strengths.
And Dean has a voice that should be heard.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2003.
