Look for Dean (D-Jeffords) to beat Dick LoseHeart (D-Misery) in Iowa, and thrash unfortunately too little too late Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) in N.H., meanwhile, Wesley Clark (D-NATO), who is REACHING voters despite the propapunditgandists attempts to caricature him as a "wooden soldier," "spooky," "wound too tight" and/or a "shamless opportunist," to come in second in N.H. and win some states on Super Tuesday and come in a strong second to Dean in the others....At that point, the other "major" contenders will be forced out of the race, and Dean and Clark will show the country how intelligent, principled men can compete head to head without destroying each other's chances (something I guess LoseHeart and Kerry can't understand -- they are spending money on ads attacking Dean instead of Bush). Once Dean and Clark meet in the middle sometime in Febuary, the only question remaining is which one will run at the top of the ticket, it will be Clark-Dean or Dean-Clark...That's the best case scenario...
Michael Tomasky: "If Clinton modernized the message," says Simon Rosenberg, the most prominent centrist Democrat who's enthusiastic about Dean, "then Dean is rebuilding the party. In the '90s party, it was, 'Write us a big check.' Regular people were left out of that equation. Now, through new technology, we're getting them back in."
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Michael Tomasky: "If Clinton modernized the message," says Simon Rosenberg, the most prominent centrist Democrat who's enthusiastic about Dean, "then Dean is rebuilding the party. In the '90s party, it was, 'Write us a big check.' Regular people were left out of that equation. Now, through new technology, we're getting them back in."
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http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/1/tomasky-m.html
Is It Time to Believe?
Bill Clinton rebuilt the Democratic Party in crucial ways. But Howard Dean is rebuilding it in a way Clinton missed. Party insiders would do well to make their peace with it.
By Michael Tomasky
Issue Date: 1.1.04
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As Democrats in Iowa and beyond prepare to start
voting, we can look back and identify four distinct
phases of this nascent presidential campaign: the
early, we-get-to-know-them phase; the preliminary
nuts-and-bolts phase, concerned with which candidate
hired which professionals; the money-chase phase; and,
most recently, the first winnowing phase, when
observers felt they finally knew enough about the play
of things to start making predictions.
These phases have had their distinct characteristics,
but they have one thing in common: In each of them,
Howard Dean was prematurely and mistakenly written
off. In phase one he was too abrasive; in phase two
he'd hired second-raters; in phase three he couldn't
possibly raise big money; and in the last phase he'd
peaked too early. The reality, instead, is that he and
campaign manager Joe Trippi have run a dazzlingly
brilliant and innovative campaign. Al Gore's
imprimatur or no, he could still be "stopped"—other
candidates in the field have positive attributes, and
voters haven't cast a ballot yet. But Dean just seems
to get stronger every week, challenging not only the
laws of politics but of Isaac Newton himself. Why?
Let's rewind the tape to December1988. the Democratic
Party had hit rock bottom. It had just lost its third
presidential election in a row, and this time with a
candidate who'd been 17 points ahead in the polls as
late as August. The party was riven by ideological
divisions. And it was losing the memory of itself as a
vibrant organism—no Democrat under 35 or so in 1988
had a living memory of a truly successful Democratic
president. Finally, there was no clear "comer" who
could save it, certainly not that gabby governor from
Arkansas who jabbered on and on at the 1988 convention
podium to such an extent that he became a national
curiosity, invited on The Tonight Show to explain
himself (yes, yes: publicity was the point).
It turned out that Bill Clinton was the comer the
party needed. He rebuilt it; indeed, he saved it. But
for the purposes of thinking clearly about the Dean
phenomenon, it's crucial to think about the particular
ways in which Clinton rebuilt the party, and one way
in which he did not.
Clinton rebuilt the party ideologically. He shed it of
some of its more hidebound ways. Whether one agrees
with, say, his support for welfare reform or NAFTA, it
must be said that those moves took some political
courage insofar as there wasn't much of a natural
constituency within the Democratic Party for his
positions. Moving something as large as a political
party off a marker on which it has stood for a
generation or two is no easy thing.
He also rebuilt the party as a fund-raising machine.
This, as we know, has had both its good and its ill
effects. But whatever the downsides, this rebuilding,
too, was necessary. From the stock-market boom to the
exorbitant price of gourmet mustards, the 1990s
culture was about money. Politics was not immune. The
Democrats, always cash-poor compared with the
Republicans—and especially so after losing three
presidential elections in a row—needed to join the
financial big leagues to be able to compete.
But there is one way in which Clinton did not rebuild
the Democratic Party: from the ground up. Beyond
rhetoric, and the occasional action, he didn't really
make it a party of the people. He and Al Gore did
energize a youth vote in 1992, and he made millions of
voters who'd been disaffected feel comfortable voting
Democratic again, bringing important states like New
Jersey back into the Democratic camp.
But he never situated the party as an entity that
represented the aspirations of its people—its most
committed members. Back to Newton: For every action,
there is an equal and opposite reaction. And the
reaction to bringing the party to the center and
allying it more closely with corporate donors was that
the people at the bottom of the totem pole felt a
little detached. (Remember: Fierce loyalty to Clinton
within the party's base didn't really kick into fifth
gear until the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when many
progressives defended Clinton less because of the man
himself than because of what they saw as a functional
coup d'état.)
This is where Howard Dean comes in. If one thinks of
the Democratic Party as rebuilding itself after its
disastrous 1980s, then Dean—or more appropriately,
"Deanism"—is a new and potentially more powerful stage
of the rebuilding process. Clinton rebuilt (forgive
the Marxist terminology, but it happens to fit) the
superstructure. Dean is rebuilding the base. "If
Clinton modernized the message," says Simon Rosenberg,
the most prominent centrist Democrat who's
enthusiastic about Dean, "then Dean is rebuilding the
party. In the '90s party, it was, 'Write us a big
check.' Regular people were left out of that equation.
Now, through new technology, we're getting them back
in."
There's a tricky thing about this rebuilding stage,
though: It excludes party insiders. It has nothing to
do with Washington. It's no wonder that Democratic
insiders, so accustomed to having complete ownership
of a process like a party primary campaign, should
dislike Dean and even fear him: He has stolen the
process right out of their hands. He is not "of" them
in any way, shape or form. In fact, his accumulating
successes merely serve to emphasize their irrelevance
to this rebuilding stage. No wonder they should take a
kind of emotional comfort in writing him off as the
new George McGovern; it's much easier to dismiss a
thorny thing than to come to terms with it.
It isn't clear—yet—that Dean can rebuild the potential
Democratic electorate beyond the party base. But it
isn't clear that he can't, either.
If Deanism was, and is, a natural and entirely logical
part of a larger historical process—there's still a
question: It's the right movement, sure, but is he the
right candidate?
The voters, the process and the man himself will tell
us that in time. Dick Gephardt, John Kerry and John
Edwards would all be perfectly good candidates. Each
has an argument. With regard to Wesley Clark, we can't
quite say yet whether he'd be a good candidate, though
he brings a few qualities to the table whose potential
appeal in November is obvious. And goodness knows, if
any of the above manages to overcome Dean and become
the nominee, he sure will have earned the title.
Unless, that is, he benefited from an insider-driven
process designed to block Dean at all costs. At this
point, after he has amassed the armies of small donors
and bloggers and volunteers, blocking Dean is not
blocking one man. It's blocking the hopes of millions
of Democrats who—understand the importance of
this—would walk through fire for a candidate for the
first time in their lives. That isn't something that
should be done cavalierly; in the long term, blocking
the active participation of these millions may do more
damage to the Democratic Party than four more years of
George W. Bush.
Besides, insurgents do win sometimes. Because the
standard historical analogies to Dean (McGovern, Barry
Goldwater) have now run their course, let me add two
more to the mix. The first is Andrew Jackson—invoked,
significantly, by Dean himself at the Dec. 9
endorsement event with Gore. Say all you want about
1828 being ancient history, but some things are
eternal. Bringing new constituencies into the process
and transforming politics through that infusion is one
of them. Yesterday it was the pamphleteer, today it's
the blogger; but the impulse and the ardor are the
same. Another is Harold Washington. It was impossible,
the experts said, for African Americans to elect a
black mayor in Chicago. Couldn't be done. Well, it
happened. He won the way Jackson did, which is the way
Dean is hoping to.
But ultimately, forget historical analogies. What's
important is not to ponder past Novembers but to focus
hard on this coming one.
Insiders need to start thinking about making their
peace with Deanism. The party—the (still) post-1988
party—needs a rebuilt base, and Dean is doing that in
a way that has no precedent. And instead of fretting
about all the ways Dean could lose, the insiders might
do better to spend some time thinking about how he
might win.
Because he might. It was interesting that, in the wake
of Gore's endorsement of Dean, it was conservative
commentator William Kristol who wrote the column that
most emphatically enumerated Bush's vulnerabilities.
Sure, Kristol may have had his own reasons for arguing
that Dean is competitive, but the facts of Bush's weak
points are real. He has the powers of incumbency,
money and a feared (actually, overly feared) political
operation. But his numbers are soft. Gore's 2000
states plus Ohio or Arizona is a long, long way from
being an impossible task—for Dean or for any of the
aforementioned.
So let the race begin. And expect the impossible. It
happens often.
Michael Tomasky
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc.
Preferred Citation: Michael Tomasky, "Is It Time to
Believe?," The American Prospect vol. 15 no. 1,
January 1, 2004 . This article may not be resold,
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