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The conservative wing of the Democratic Party calls him another McGovern -- but Howard Dean might be more in touch with today's electorate than his critics.
Jul 25, 2003 | George McGovern may be a gravel-voiced 80-year-old summering in the Rockies, but the retired South Dakota senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee can still see a few things about the upcoming battle for the 2004 Democratic crown.
The first is that the campaign of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, is "not going anywhere." The second is that Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., is unlikely to "excite many of the kind of people who attend caucuses or vote in primaries." The third is that Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., "seemed to be promising early" but has since faded off the scene.
But the most important thing McGovern can see about the upcoming presidential contest of 2004 is that it is not taking place in 1972, and that he is not running in it. Certainly, McGovern can see some resemblance between himself and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. They're both from sparsely populated, rural states. They both entered their respective races early, and became heavily reliant on volunteers and grass-roots mobilizing. That aside, though, "I think it's difficult to draw a close comparison," says McGovern.
"There's no transcendent issue now that he's identified with," says McGovern, who met Dean and some of the other Democratic presidential aspirants at a May conference on rural issues in Lake Placid, N.Y. "There's no Vietnam War, no Great Depression ... I don't see any single issue that has mobilized especially the young people and women like 1972 did. There was something about the Vietnam involvement that did create a divide in the Democratic Party probably surpassed only by the period of the Civil War, which had a shattering impact on the Democratic coalition. I don't think there's anything quite as divisive culturally or politically today.
"Another difference," continues McGovern somewhat wistfully, "is that he has a large sum of money in the race more than a year ahead of the election and I was never but one step ahead of the bill collectors ... I never had the millions that he has."
There are plenty of other differences, too -- such as the rise of the Internet and a front-loaded primary schedule next year that could provide a clear winner as early as March 3, whereas McGovern's state-by-state slog for the nomination lasted through and then into a convention so divisive that California's delegation was challenged all the way to the Supreme Court and four of McGovern's vice-presidential picks turned him down publicly before he finally won over former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver.
But to hear Howard Dean's critics in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, he is nothing less than the second coming of McGovern, doomed to lead the party into the same electoral inferno if he wins its nomination next year. According to Al From, CEO and founder of the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, and Bruce Reed, DLC president and President Bill Clinton's former domestic policy guru, Dean must be stopped before he steers the party back to the McGovern era of bell-bottoms and muttonchops -- and back to political oblivion.
"I would never wish the '70s on anybody," Reed wrote in a June 30 column in the DLC's Blueprint magazine. And yet for the past two-and-half months, he's done his level best to drag the debate about how to beat Bush in 2004 all the way back to 1972, the year his colleague and Progressive Policy Institute head Will Marshall recalled, in a sentimental Blueprint story, that he'd "wound up casting my first presidential ballot, with scant enthusiasm, for McGovern," and the same year From was directing a Senate subcommittee headed by losing Democratic presidential aspirant Ed Muskie, D-Maine. The history lessons started with a May 15 broadside by From and Reed, "The Real Soul of the Democratic Party," that called out Dean by name. "What activists like Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home," they wrote. "That's the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one."
Soon a full-scale media barrage against creeping Deanism was launched, with From-Reed Op-Eds in the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, and another Dean takedown by Lawrence Kaplan, the New Republic's neoconservative senior editor. Kaplan was joined by his New Republic colleague Jonathan Chait, who offered a novel twist on the anti-Dean theme, comparing him not to McGovern, but to another notorious loser, former Republican presidential aspirant Steve Forbes.
Confronted with these comparisons, Dean for America campaign manager Joe Trippi just sighs. "How come it's always us who's gotta be somebody else?" he asks. "The truth is that our name is Howard Dean. Howard Dean is Howard Dean. He's not anybody else, and that's why people support him."
So far, From and Reed's warnings to the Democratic Party, to the extent that they've reached the rank and file at all, appear to have had no impact on Dean's campaign, which has surged in fundraising, volunteer support and national and state polls. If anything, the DLC's attacks have increased support for the Dean campaign, which sees its fundraising spike each time it comes under attack from the Washington insiders, says Trippi. That's because rather than running as McGovern, Dean seems to be running according to the campaign playbook outlined by none other than From and Reed in their very smart Feb. 11 memo, "What It Takes to Win the White House."
"Your most formidable opponent," the duo wrote, "isn't President Bush or your fellow contestants for the nomination. Your real enemy is the ghost of Democrats past.
"[P]arty perceptions are a wonderful foil for an insurgent candidate looking to define himself," they continued, urging the candidates to refuse "to be subtle about defying the Democratic stereotype." Added Bernard L. Schwartz and Daniel Yankelovich in the same issue of Blueprint magazine: "The worst mistake Democrats can make is to continue to work within a Republican framework. This is how Democrats were snookered in the 2002 election."
What From and Reed did not realize is that their DLC would become the Democratic ghost against which an insurgent Dean would run.
Rather than running against the Democratic Party of 1972, Dean is running against the DLC-dominated (in image, if not in fact) Democratic Party that lost the House in 1994, the White House in 2000, and the Senate in 2000 and again in 2002. This, too, is just as From and Reed advised, though they seem to have forgotten that.
"The real front-runner, fresh off its triumph in the midterms, is the Democratic Party's losing image," they wrote in February. "If you want to win the presidency in 2004, you have to redefine the Democratic Party in 2003. By all means, capture your party's imagination -- but do it on your terms, not theirs."
That is exactly what Dean is doing -- by directly challenging the party's support for the president's war in Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, and such losing or poorly funded pieces of legislation as the Patient's Bill of Rights and the No Child Left Behind Act. "Don't look for the false unity that comes from shying away from every controversial issue, and reject the consultant consensus that stacking constituency upon constituency will add up to a majority," wrote From and Reed. "Now more than ever, the one reason to seek the presidency, and the only way to win it, is to unite people behind a cause that is larger than your candidacy."
And so Dean's presidential announcement speech on June 23 reached for the broadest themes possible: "This campaign is about more than issue differences on health care or tax policy, national security, jobs, the environment, our economy ... It's about who we are as Americans," Dean told the 30,000 people across the country who followed his speech. "I ask all Americans, regardless of party, to meet with me across the nation -- to come together in common cause to forge a new American century. Help us in this quest to return greatness and return high moral purpose to the United States of America."
Now that Dean is capturing the party's imagination on his own terms, the DLC is crying foul. And From and Reed are using every available opportunity to whack the former governor of Vermont. By their statements over the past two months, From and Reed have shown that the few years their group has spent in the electoral wilderness since the Clinton administration have intensified a process that had already begun in the late '90s: turning the DLC into just another interest group clamoring to have its agenda considered uppermost and its favorite sons promoted, irrespective of any concerns about winning elections.
The group is losing sight of the larger narrative, and assisting its real opposition by attacking Dean. Already, the McGovern-peacenik-Democratic-weakness charge is spreading from DLC articles into the mouths of Republican critics, except the DLC charge is creating a blowback that will damage all Democrats -- including those who voted for the president's war resolution -- on matters of foreign policy. "The Dems are still the party of George McGovern, and for them it's still 1968," wrote Jed Babbin, deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration on National Review Online July 23, in the first of what will no doubt be many such articles to come. But Babbin wasn't talking about Dean, whom he didn't even mention, or the pre-war debate over Iraq. No, what inspired this broadside was the quest all nine Democratic candidates share: to get to the bottom of the Niger-uranium claim in Bush's State of the Union speech. Wrote Babbin: "The McGoverniks and their pals in the press have been working feverishly to turn the 'Niger uranium' sentence in the State of the Union address into the same sort of fraud they attribute to the reports that led Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf resolution."
