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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
I haven't decided to vote for Howard Dean, but after 10 days watching his campaign, I promise never to say he's unelectable again.
Aug 11, 2003 | It was just before 7 last Wednesday night, right after Arnold Schwarzenegger transformed the California recall election from a fiasco into a certified freak show (OK, Gary Coleman and Larry Flynt helped). I needed a drink, as well as a reason not to give up on democracy. Luckily I was in the right place to get both: one of nearly 500 local "Meetups" held nationwide for supporters of presidential candidate Howard Dean.
Mine was at The Plough and the Stars pub in San Francisco's Richmond district. On this gorgeous summer night, a standing-room-only crowd of roughly 150 people packed the steamy bar, not to listen to its trademark Irish music but to starry-eyed local activists talking about the former governor of Vermont. I know, I know, a crowded pub of groovy San Franciscans for Dean isn't a man bites dog kind of story -- that's exactly who everybody thinks is turning out for him, and why many people have written him off -- but pay attention anyway.
My venture into the world of Dean Meetups was my big fat mea culpa: Two weeks ago I whacked the Democratic Leadership Council for bashing Dean as too "far left" to beat George Bush. But I took a shot at Dean, too, saying I thought Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was more electable. As usual, whenever you diminish Dean (or say something nice about another Democrat, especially Kerry), I got spammed by Dean's vast army of netizens. Some were nasty, most were nice. Several invited me to Dean Meetups in their town, so I could see firsthand the way the good doctor was resuscitating democracy. The Meetups are just one component of Dean's famous Internet strategy: Using the for-profit Meetup.com, which helps anyone who registers (Bill O'Reilly fans, cat lovers, Wiccans) locate like-minded local folks and find a place to get together, Dean supporters have put together thousands of these combination house parties and town-hall meetings over the last eight months and registered more than 80,000 people. I became one of them: I registered, I found a local Dean Meetup; I RSVP'd.
It just so happened that the week I decided to investigate the Dean phenomenon firsthand was the week the former Vermont governor jumped from whiny unelectable protest candidate to the frontrunner among likely voters, in some polls anyway, in Iowa, New Hampshire and California. He was gracing the cover of both Time and Newsweek, just like, that's right, Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen's 1975 Time-Newsweek score is every baby-boomer's association with that P.R. feat -- although lots of other folks have done it, from Liza Minelli to Steve Forbes -- and the odd media convergence served to warn me against the swoon, the delicious danger of declaring someone "the future of" whatever, rock 'n' roll (as in Jon Landau's famous take on Springsteen, which even the great one himself never really lived up to) or the Democratic Party. The Time-Newsweek covers served to make me appropriately wary of hyperbole and the whole world of media hype -- OK, my world -- that elevates people semi-capriciously (Steve Forbes?) only to have them handy to knock down again.
Of course last week's Dean hype managed to do both at once. It knocked him down by setting him up, in a way. No longer was the question "Is he too liberal to be electable?" Reporters belatedly scoured his record and discovered a fiscal conservative who put balanced budgets before social spending in Vermont, who opposes federal gun control legislation and backs the death penalty for certain crimes. Now the make-or-break question about Dean became: "Will liberals desert him when they figure out that he's actually a moderate?" Then came other pre-fab worries about the problems of sudden success: Had Dean peaked too soon? Could his fledgling campaign handle the attention? And OK, maybe he was moderate enough to be electable, but was he likable enough? Was his reputation for "straight talk" just a euphemism for brusque and arrogant?
Hanging out with the local Dean folks was my way of getting out of what his campaign dismisses as "the media echo chamber," and trying to figure out what's really going on. I've lived here almost 20 years. I know the San Francisco Dean phenomenon is not a microcosm of what it will take to get him elected; I saw the way the GOP smeared House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- and pushed her to the center some -- by calling her a "San Francisco Democrat" before she even took over the leadership post. I know we're DLC founder Al From's worst nightmare. But I also saw some intriguing things following Dean around San Francisco at the end of July, and talking to his supporters the week after he'd gone. The Bay Area Dean machine is attracting more than the usual suspects: It's neither the Greens nor the City Hall regulars; it's neither the moneyed elite nor the rabble; it's not just the young and the hip; it's not ponytailed '60s holdovers -- it's all of them, and then some. I met Republicans and Ross Perot voters who were supporting the antiwar candidate who promises to repeal Bush's tax cuts. And I met Dean himself, and watched two speeches. You can't get his charisma without seeing him in person.
And yet ... I'm not writing to endorse Howard Dean. I'm not declaring him the future of the Democratic Party. I still like John Kerry, too. Honest. In fact, I've adopted what I'm calling the Donna Brazile stance. When I phoned the veteran liberal activist and 2000 Gore campaign manager to talk about Dean, she just raved about him. I pushed her: "Wow, Donna, you sound like you love the guy -- are you sure you're not backing him? Are you going to work for him?" I even asked if she wanted to talk off the record.
She stopped me cold. "You called me to talk about Howard Dean. If you'd called to talk about Joe Lieberman, I'd have raved about him, too. I'm finding something to love about all these candidates. One of them is going to defeat George Bush."
So that's how I feel, too, I think. I can support anyone who gets the nomination (which means I don't have to square Al Sharpton's new charisma and common sense with his race-baiting history, or ask myself if I could live with Dennis Kucinich's self-righteous lefty screeching for four years, because they're not going to be nominated).
But Donna Brazile had a twinkle in her voice when she talked about Howard Dean, I thought. Or maybe that was just projection. Maybe it was my twinkle.
