Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Of course, Larry Brilliant is exactly the kind of guy you expect to love Howard Dean. Casey Williams isn't. The stocky, friendly meatpacker from tiny Friona, Texas, voted for Ross Perot twice; he was undecided about a candidate for 2004 until he saw Dean at the UFCW's healthcare forum with me at the end of July. He decided right there Dean was the man to beat Bush. "I really didn't know about Dean except from reading the papers a little," Williams explained. "But I liked what he said. He's honest, and he's tough."
The UFCW convention was Dick Gephardt country. The place was papered with Gephardt placards but only a minority waved them. The Missouri congressman got lots of applause, but Dean got as much or maybe even more. Helen Chesser, a middle-aged grocery store worker from Dallas, said she was "sticking with Gephardt right now, because of all the years he's been there for us." Then she took my pen to get Dean's autograph, flirted with him a minute, and he flirted back. When I said goodbye she shook my hand and told me, sounding wistful: "I think Dean might be the only one tough enough to beat Bush."
The UFCW crowd seemed a lot like Donna Brazile: They were ready to love everybody. Only the leftier candidates -- Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun, Gephardt and Dean -- showed up; Sharpton couldn't make it, but Kerry appeared by satellite, as befits his attempt to be a more centrist liberal. All of them got big cheers. These were the folks Al From tried to warn us about. But if Dean hadn't been red-baited by the DLC, you might well hear him as the moderate in the race. He criticized Kucinich and Moseley Braun's call for single-payer universal healthcare, the left's politically impossible dream, as well as Gephardt's expensive public-private hybrid. Kerry vied with Dean for the moderate mantle with his relatively modest healthcare plan, but overall Dean came off as the fiscal conservative in the bunch. Amazingly, he got the biggest hand from this union audience when he called George Bush a "borrow and spend, credit-card Republican" and promised to erase the deficit if he's elected.
It's also amazing that Dean could be the single biggest obstacle to Gephardt's dreams of running away with the labor endorsement. He's getting ready to make inroads with black and other minority voters, too. I laughed when I read Jake Tapper's great first Salon take on Dean-- which was mostly positive, but got more critical when Dean trotted out his black college roommates at Yale as evidence he's going to pull in African Americans, eventually, too. Of course, as you read the piece you saw it wasn't totally ridiculous: His old college pals pretty much vouched for the guy, they support him and predicted he'd win wider black support. And he plans to. He just hired Christopher Edley, who staffed Clinton's race commission, and his wife Maria Esteveste, to help him colorize his constituency. Last week he lured Carol Moseley Braun's campaign manager, Andrea Pringle, to be his deputy campaign manager. Donna Brazile told me a version of the story she's telling everyone, about the African Methodist Episcopal bishop in New Orleans who loves Dean. "He saw that first debate in South Carolina and he told me, 'Donna, I've got a candidate -- it's Dean!'"
The other thing Dean's got going for him is that he seems comfortable in his skin, and that attracts voters of every skin tone. Al Sharpton has reportedly told friends that of all his campaign-trail colleagues, he likes the gray-haired white boy from Vermont. Dean positively flirts with Carol Moseley Braun at debates and other joint appearances. I wouldn't dismiss his ability to attract minority support. "Black voters are pragmatists; they'll support someone who can beat Bush," says Brazile.
Although the audience for Dean's San Francisco environmental speech was fairly racially diverse, my Meetup was overwhelmingly white, but I loved it anyway. Partly the turnout had to do with being in an Irish bar in a relatively conservative San Francisco neighborhood -- though one speaker hailed the Irish as great supporters of "revolution." But the Meetup I attended was diverse in its own way. The fundraising and events volunteer who gave a little pitch is a one-time Perot voter, Chris Zychowski, a pink-cheeked former software engineer who doesn't look old enough either to have voted for Perot or to have left one career for another. Now he's headed to law school, he says, "after the Dean campaign," for which he's a full-time volunteer.
The Meetup turnout made me think of something Moveon.org's Zack Exley said: "The Dean campaign will ultimately succeed only if it can use the Internet to build a real grass-roots organization and campaign." The Internet has been Dean's version of John McCain's "Straight Talk Express," his vehicle for getting his blunt message across to voters. Of course it's far more powerful than McCain's media-beloved photo-ops -- Dean has used e-mail to identify supporters, and to raise millions of dollars, which is significant in itself. But Exley wants to see if Dean can use the Internet to do the nuts and bolts of getting elected: "Can he use it to mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters? Can he find volunteers who are willing to leaflet, to be precinct workers, develop voter lists, phone banks, do Election Day get-out-the-vote?"
What most impressed me at the Meetup was the extent to which it's helping Dean do all of that. Folks were signing up to leaflet, to work the media, to plan events, to fundraise. The Meetups have also helped morph into the DeanCorps, an attempt to link the campaign to other types of volunteerism and vice versa. They're going to start serving breakfast at Glide Memorial Church, a hothouse of local liberal activism and social service; September Meetups will encourage attendees to bring school supplies.
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