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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
In a candid interview, the former front-runner goes after his two main adversaries -- George W. Bush and John Kerry -- and says they're a lot alike.
Feb 2, 2004 | In 2003 Howard Dean burst on the scene as the pugnacious Democratic partisan itching to take on George W. Bush, undeterred by the president's inflated post-9/11 popularity. He was the stand-alone guy who stood up against the Iraq invasion. It was his message of tough-minded liberal empowerment that resonated among rank-and-file Democrats despairing of their elected leadership's halting and impotent efforts to battle the Bush conservative agenda. Growing legions of Deaniacs, compelled by his straight talk and fearless defense of core Democratic principles, self-organized over the Internet, flooded his campaign coffers with record donations and transformed him from small beer to big wheel in the race to take on the corporatist from Crawford.
And so it was that only one short month ago, Dean was seemingly on a roll. The former Vermont governor began this election year as the undisputed front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But the past month has not been as kind. The other leading candidates effectively co-opted Dean's populist, anti-Bush message -- while sheathing it in ostensibly more electable packages. With astonishing rapidity, his support collapsed in the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses. He finished a distant third, 20 points behind Sen. John Kerry, his arch-rival from Massachusetts, even after a hugely expensive advertising blitz and a massive, if ineffectual, organizing effort.
Last week he lost New Hampshire, where he once enjoyed a 30-point lead in the polls, by a double-digit margin to the surging Kerry. Then his campaign manager, Web guru Joe Trippi, quit the campaign rather than face demotion. Dean's once bulging campaign coffers are now drained, his staffers working without pay, and the latest tracking polls predict he will go down in flames in all seven of Tuesday's primaries as well.
The conventional wisdom says he is finished, a political dead man walking. But someone forgot to tell Howard Dean. He is reputedly not the sort to go down without a fight, and he appears determined to live up to his combative reputation. In consultation with top aides, Dean has come up with a new strategy for a much leaner, and perhaps a bit meaner, guerrilla campaign, targeting a handful of February states -- Washington, Michigan, Maine and Wisconsin -- in the run-up to the big California and New York primaries on March 2. And with the bull's-eye now on Kerry's back, Dean is once again happily throwing darts with abandon. In a Saturday afternoon interview, Dean said he was "incensed" and "sputtering" mad over Kerry's heavy reliance on special-interest donations during his career in the U.S. Senate. "It's one thing to say you're against special interests, but he isn't," Dean riffed. "He's taken more money than any other senator in the last 15 years. I mean, that's pretty blatant. George Bush does the same thing. It seems to me there's a little of George Bush in John Kerry."
By any ordinary political calculus the nomination now seems like a pipe dream, but Dean has defied expectations before. After a loud and loving rally before an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 in anti-Bush, anti-war Seattle -- arguably ground zero of the once-mighty Dean Nation -- the candidate, appearing relaxed and confident, held forth on recent developments, his new underdog status and his rivalry with John Kerry.
Not so long ago you were on top of the campaign heap. Even at the beginning of January, you were the front-runner, leading in Iowa, well ahead in New Hampshire. Now, having lost the first two contests, you're the underdog. What happened?
We just got absolutely pummeled by everyone who was interested in pummeling the front-runner. Others will now have the delightful experience of being the front-runner. In some ways it's easier to run from behind. There are a lot of advantages to being the front-runner, you have a lot of momentum, but you also get a lot of media scrutiny and a lot of attention from everybody else in the race.
That aside, have you had a chance to reflect over the events of the past month, and do you see personal mistakes you may have made that played into your defeats?
I'm sure there are dozens and dozens of them. But it's pretty hard to reflect when you're right in the middle of a series of primaries every single week. I'm sure there'll be time for reflection later on.
Do you think you do better, given your personality, as the underdog rather than the front-runner?
Yeah, probably. It's a hell of a lot more fun than being the pin cushion for every media organization in the country and all the other opponents in the Democratic Party and the Democratic Leadership Council.
