Friday, Sep 5, 2008
I caught up with Dean, literally (I had to chase him down the street after a speech to the United Food and Commercial Workers convention) on July 31, a couple of days after the DLC had whacked him. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who gets his talking points from Al From, was taking the gloves off, too. He denounced Dean's candidacy as "a ticket to nowhere," and made himself a late-night talk-show punch line. "At least Lieberman will have someone to ride with now," Jay Leno quipped. Ouch.
Even before Leno took his side in the debate, Dean told me the DLC's attacks didn't bother him. "I don't respond to that stuff," he shrugged. "For one thing, every time they do it, I raise a ton of money."
I told him about the e-mail spanking I'd gotten from his supporters after calling Kerry more electable. He apologized, sort of. "That's not my campaign, you know that?" Oh yes, I told him, I was familiar with his rowdy Internet following. He was understandably proud of it. "The key to winning is turning out 3-4 million people who didn't vote last time around," he explained.
I've heard that before, I shot back. I knew I only had a short time with Dean, so I poured my heart out. I want to believe you, I said, but I've heard Democrats talk about that since 1984, when I was covering the NAACP's Operation Big Vote and HumanServe and the Women's Vote Project, and nobody's ever done it. How do you make it happen? He just smiled and said: "We'll see." Then a harried staffer told me I was making him late for a pre-scheduled media telephone interview, and could I please call the press office in Vermont and set up some phone time of my own? I said sure, and she handed him a cellphone to talk to the waiting reporter. Howard Dean said goodbye and took off without me.
What did I learn? I got enough to let me refute some of the latest media stereotypes about him. He was pretty nice to me for a brusque guy some folks call "mean," given I approached him with a lot of skepticism and I didn't have a scheduled interview. He's, um, a little bit short -- I don't care, but other people bring it up! -- but you forget about it quickly, especially when you're having to run to keep up with his energetic wrestler's stride. He's also sort of ... sexy, which I mention because it counteracts the associations folks have with short, which is supposedly not charismatic or presidential, and also probably because I'm shallow.
Of course, I wanted to know much more, but that's all I can say about Dean based on our one-on-one interaction, because that's all the time I ever got with him. So I also learned, after trying to follow up with his campaign staff and schedule an interview for a full week, that he is being overwhelmed by success, at least temporarily. It took days to get calls returned, and I never did get time with him. But everybody I talked to was so darn nice about it, it was hard to get mad. "We just don't have enough staff yet to keep up with all of this," someone who answered the phone one day told me apologetically. I got callbacks from three different people, all of whom were sweet and apologetic, none of whom got me time with him, or with campaign manager Joe Trippi, or any of the other information I wanted. I say this not to complain or to dis them, but to document. "They're having a lot of growing pains," one San Francisco volunteer confided. "But they're hiring, and it'll get better soon." I hope she's right.
Besides, I didn't need alone time with Dean to shed my cynicism about his electability as much as I needed to see his effect on other people. And I saw that at his two San Francisco speeches and the Meetup the next week. At his July 31 environmental address, which was open to the public, he packed the generic chandaliered ballroom of the Crowne Plaza Hotel with several hundred admirers, of whom I knew exactly two. There was a teeming crowd out front waiting for him ... like he was Bruce Springsteen or something. And despite stereotypes about the former Vermont governor's limited racial appeal, it was a pretty diverse crowd, with an almost respectable turnout of African Americans, Asians and Latinos. Sure, I saw a white guy in dreads and a white guy in a little knit kufi and I smelled patchouli once, but I also saw corporate folks in suits and suburban socialites. I saw the campaign's techy backers, too, at least a half-dozen 20-somethings capturing Dean's entrance with those cool little cameras in their cellphones.
"I'm sorry, but that was not your usual San Francisco political crowd," says Amy Rao, a Dean stalwart who said she didn't know many of the folks who turned out that morning, either. Rao's the CEO of a Palo Alto tech firm and a local Democratic fundraising powerhouse, and she held an April lunch for Dean. "At the time, I liked what he was saying, but I really didn't think he was electable," she confesses. Outside the restaurant just before Dean arrived, she noticed about a dozen young people holding picket signs and rushed out to see what the trouble was. The signs were Dean placards. "They were just Dean supporters who'd figured out he was in town and showed up to support him," she said, still marveling at his word-of-mouth base. Now she insists he's not only electable, he's the only Democrat who can beat Bush.
I saw parts of the Dean appeal quickly. He took the stage to frenzied applause, and asked the audience right away: "How many of you haven't been active in politics in the last 10-15 years?" And more than three-quarters of the crowd raised hands. He did his trademark transparency thing, apologizing for the fact that he was about to make a pretty formal policy speech. "There are some times in a campaign where you have to read speeches, and this is one. So forgive me if it gets drier than you're used to." He turns most of his imperfections into charm. His cellphone rang while he was speaking -- Lord, doesn't he have someone to turn it off for him? -- and he pretended the caller was Karl Rove. The crowd ate it up.
I ran into Well co-founder, entrepreneur and activist Larry Brilliant, the only other person besides Amy Rao I knew personally, and he was beaming. "Look at this crowd!" he said, marveling at its size and diversity. Later, he explained Dean's appeal in an e-mail. "Liberals like myself may be disappointed to find out he's a fiscal conservative, in the mold of Clinton not FDR, and a moderate on most things -- except this obscene ideological 'coup' of the Bush crowd. But I'm surprised how happy I am that someone is finally calling the emperor on the fact that he has no clothes. I was afraid Bush's deceptions would go unchallenged. That alone makes me love Howard Dean. I also happen to think he can win."
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