Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Some of the insurgent's supporters say they're going to take their idealism and go home --- but most of them will probably get over their bitterness and support the nominee.
Feb 4, 2004 | On Jan. 30, three days after Howard Dean came in a disappointing second in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, posters on the late-night open thread on the Dean for America blog excoriated John Kerry. "At first, I was in the ABB [Anybody But Bush] category, but I refuse to be cowtowed [sic] by the corporate-controlled media and vote for a gutless democrat who rolled over and played dead for George Bush or one who helped draft the Patriot Act," wrote Sydney Platt, a 42-year-old from Houston. Another poster castigated her, but many more supported her sentiment. One wrote, "I have decided that perhaps America must lose everything to value something. That may be what it takes to actually get our country back if Dean goes down."
If this sounds familiar, it's because some of the rhetoric coming out of the most disillusioned quarters of the Dean camp recalls that of the Ralph Nader campaign. Among parts of the Dean movement these days, there's much railing at the corporate-dominated Democratic Party, plenty talk of rejecting the "lesser of two evils" approach to politics and abundant slandering of front-runner John Kerry as "Bush-lite." So as it grows increasingly likely that Dean won't be the Democratic nominee in 2004 -- and that Kerry will be -- some are wondering, and worrying, whether all the devoted legions of activists that Dean brought into the Democratic fold will stay in the party, spoil the race or just stay home. If Dean goes down, will one of the greatest grass-roots movements in Democratic history go with him -- a rerun of the Nader fiasco four years ago? Or will Dean supporters decide that beating Bush is more important than remaining true to their man and their principles and support the Democratic nominee, whoever he is?
Most Dean supporters, like Dean himself, say they'll vote Democratic no matter what. "I certainly am [going to back the Democrat], and the vast majority of Dean supporters that I work with also will be doing that," says Linda Watson, a Dean volunteer who founded the Web site and mailing list Deaniacs.org. And progressives in general are uncommonly unified -- Eli Pariser, campaigns director of MoveOn.org, says most activists he knows have remained nonsectarian and will happily back any of the Democratic front-runners. "Clearly people are picking favorites in the primaries," he says. "But they tell us that whoever the candidate is, they're in for that fight, and that electing a new president trumps their interest in a particular candidate."
Pariser's comments are significant because the MoveOn and Dean phenomena are closely related. Still, a faction of the Dean movement seems ready to punish the party -- indeed, to punish the country -- for failing to heed Dean's message and repay their own ardent campaigning. Their anger is directed especially at Kerry, whom they blame for dashing their dreams. Given how close the election is likely to be, even a few thousand disillusioned Deaniacs could tip the election to George Bush, the man Dean grew famous for disparaging.
"It looks like the Democratic Party, they're just bullying us around by putting Kerry out there," says Platt, a Dean volunteer who says she's never been involved in politics before this campaign. "The press is courting him. They think they're going to win and I'm not going to let that happen. Kerry voted to let Bush have carte blanche [on Iraq] because he was too weak to stand up to him. There's no reason to support the man, after all the effort we put out ..."
But isn't four more years of Bush reason enough to support any Democrat? "Maybe in four years the Democratic Party will learn something," says Platt. "Maybe it takes another four years for it to hit rock bottom before they will wake up and smell the coffee." Platt is echoed by Nancy Fulton, a 39-year-old mother of three from Santa Monica, Calif., who says that rather than vote for Kerry, "I might be happier impeaching Bush if he took a second term."
For an outsider, there's something odd about this cavalier attitude toward the threat of another Bush term. After all, much of Dean's initial appeal lay in his frank denunciations of the president's right-wing extremism at a time when other Democrats insisted on treating Bush as a credible leader. Dean thrilled his followers by articulating the full ghastliness of Bush's agenda. How, then, can those followers believe that their anger at Kerry justifies risking more of the horrors that presumably brought them into the campaign in the first place?
B.J. Rudell thinks he understands. A former grass-roots campaign organizer for Bill Bradley in New Hampshire and Rhode Island during the 2000 primary race, Rudell says he was so consumed by the intra-party competition that he couldn't get behind Gore on Election Day. "Somewhat embarrassingly in hindsight, I ended up writing Bill Bradley in," he says.
Why? "If all you care about is one person -- and you have to, if you work on a campaign -- the only way to do it is to be a true believer," says Rudell, who wrote a book about his campaign experiences, "Only In New Hampshire." "The moment these Dean people think, Well, Kerry would be an OK option, they've already lost. That will translate into the intensity or lack of intensity by which they organize."
Indeed, as his campaign hemorrhages support, Dean has tried to hold on to his base by painting Kerry, the man that the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action has given a lifetime rating of 93 percent, as a Republican. "It seems to be there's a little of George Bush in John Kerry," Dean told Salon recently. "George Bush says the most blatant things that are just plain false. No Child Left Behind leaves every child left behind -- something that Senator Kerry also voted for. How many rationales has George Bush given us for the Iraq war? Well, how many rationales has John Kerry given us for the Iraq war (which he also supported)? So I'm beginning to see a pattern. Maybe they shared a little more than just brotherhood at Skull and Bones, I don't know. I think that is not the kind of person the Democratic Party is going to win with. If you have a choice between Bush and Bush Lite why not go for Bush?" This message -- that Kerry's barely better than Bush -- is one that some of Dean's followers may be taking seriously, perhaps more than Dean intends.
More than that, though, Kerry's ascendancy robs Dean's followers of the sense of power their candidate offered. With enough hard work, they thought, citizens could seize the king-making power of the political elite. "Look at Perot, look at McCain, now we're doing Dean," says Fulton. "As a country, we've been trying repeatedly to say, look, we want an old-fashioned democracy where these guys work for us. Don't tell us what we think. Listen to what we think!"
Followers like Fulton thought they were close to regaining this prelapsarian democracy, only to have it snatched away.
"When you're out there 15 hours a day, seven days a week, trying to find supporters, and when your opponent says anything or does anything to knock your candidate down, you take it personally," Rudell says. "What the Dean people are going through right now is that phase of denial. They really believe that their candidate can win. When you come to the realization that you may not win because of the front-runner, because of Kerry or whoever, you start to feel somewhat betrayed. You don't want all your work to have been for naught. You feel there's nothing that your opponent, in this case John Kerry, has done to earn your vote."
One reason there's such a sense of betrayal in the Dean movement is that they don't feel defeated, they feel robbed. For some of the movement people who've given their whole souls to Dean over the last year, their campaign didn't lose the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Iowa and New Hampshire were stolen from them. And the person who stole them was John Kerry.
"We worked so hard all summer," says a 30-year-old Dean volunteer named Nicole who's traveled with the campaign to Iowa and New Hampshire. "We worked so hard, and to come in and see what Kerry did ... to have someone come in and trample on all our hard work," she trails off. She seems to see the injustice as self-evident.
Dressed in black, her curly hair pulled back, Nicole was working the room at a crowded Monday night voter registration party at Manhattan's Pioneer Bar. Representatives of other campaigns were on hand, as was Pariser from MoveOn, and the mood was one of cheerful anti-Bush Democratic solidarity. Nicole, though, says that if Kerry gets the nomination, it will be "a travesty." And though she'd "probably" vote for him in the general election, she also says, "I tend to see Kerry vs. Bush as two of the same evils."
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