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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A novice political volunteer explores what went wrong with Howard Dean's campaign and, with guarded optimism, looks to a future without him.
Feb 5, 2004 | One windy evening last May, when Howard Dean was an asterisk in the polls, I huddled with a couple dozen strangers around a truck outside a Borders bookstore, passing a clipboard from hand to hand. I had never been involved in electoral politics before. I didn't find Dean charismatic. I hadn't thought about whether he could win. The Internet didn't intrigue me. But I had two nephews flying helicopters in Iraq, I wanted them home, and I had given up on Democratic presidential candidates who had voted for the PATRIOT Act and made nice with Bush in the Rose Garden. Working for Dean was a way to get these things into the national conversation. He was a vehicle, not a destination.
Later in the summer, in the company of some of the people I'd met at the truck, I registered voters at an arts fair and handed out leaflets in front of a bookstore. In August (when 226,000 people contacted the Dean campaign) I ran Dean through LexisNexis, logged on to his Web site, and began to really like the guy. He hadn't just opposed the war early and signed a civil unions bill as the governor of Vermont. He'd balanced budgets, extended health coverage to almost all the state's children, and funded early intervention programs that had lowered child physical and sexual abuse rates by 40 percent and 70 percent, respectively. In Vermont, he'd been a political hybrid: a practical Yankee capitalist among Ben and Jerry's progressives, an incrementalist, and a centrist who, despite his bluntness, just might make a plausible national candidate.
By September, I was part of an American curiosity -- an Internet-driven political insurgency. I posted on Dean's blog, e-mailed strangers in Houston and Simi Valley, and got back home-burned Dean DVDs and advice on where best to hold Meetups. Near the end of the month, I wrote a $100 check and found myself in a crowd of a thousand people on U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren's lawn in San Jose. "There are more al-Qaida in Iraq now than there were before we started out, Mr. President!" Dean bellowed from a stone balustrade above us." How do you explain that?" He looked as if he was about to pop the collar buttons off his shirt. He reminded me of a short well-muscled kid who isn't afraid to get in the face of the class bully. Hundreds of people surged forward, reaching up their hands to touch him. This, I thought, is what it takes to win.
In late September I went to another party and listened to a woman testify about how well Vermont, under Dean, had taken care of her schizophrenic sister. I wrote another check and became the chair of a local grassroots committee. October came, and we succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We won the money primary. Joe Trippi announced that we'd outraised every other Democratic candidate in history, taking in $14.8 million in three months, much of it in small Internet donations. More than 400,000 people had contacted the campaign and 223,000 had contributed. We were going to run campaigns in all 50 states. We were going to opt out of public financing. We were going to rival Bush's $200 million war chest by getting 2 million people to give us $100 each.
The money was the outward and visible sign of a deeper change: The virtual world was going to restore the sense of civic community that George W. Bush had helped kill. Thousands of people like me were going to relearn a political grammar forgotten since the 1970s, when television advertising first trumped retail politics, eclipsed traditional block-by-block precinct organizing, and locked almost everyone but campaign professionals out of what they called "the process." The Democratic Party had become a hollowed-out shell, dependent on big money from Hollywood and labor unions. Dean had brought life back in: a huge, savvy force of volunteers and small donors capable of challenging corporate money, the Christian right, and the cynical political image-making parodied in movies like "The Candidate." Dean wasn't just thinking outside the box. He was changing its shape.
I'm not sure exactly what day it happened, but sometime during that September and October, I forgot that I'd stood at that truck near a Borders bookstore on a windy May evening for something bigger than candidate Dean. I got fascinated by us -- the campaign, its explosive growth, the money, the story, and the growing likelihood, given the polls and the traffic on the blogsite, that our candidate might actually win.
The end of October came, and Dean registered 40 percent to Kerry's 17 percent in the Zogby New Hampshire poll. I wrote another check. At a Meetup, I wrote letters to two strangers in Iowa and to a woman in rural New Mexico. December came, and one of my military nephews came home on leave, returning to Iraq a week after his first child was born. Gore endorsed Dean, who drew neck and neck with Gephardt in Iowa polls. Some days I'd spend an hour on the blog before getting out of my nightgown. I exercised less. The man I live with started calling me Mrs. Dean. When you get religion, you stop hearing the everyday noises of life outside you -- even the alarm clock -- and hear only the story you're telling yourself.
