I am a Howard Dean supporter. This is a rarity for me, as I have never found a politician, from any party, that actually spoke to me, and said the things that I wanted to hear, supported the positions I believed in, and that I thought would also be a good leader for our country. Currently, Howard Dean is on his way out though. Joe Trippi, his longtime campaign manager and quite possibly the soul of his operation, is gone, being replaced with a former lobbyist from the telecommunications industry. However, this change isn’t what signified Dean’s eventual decline. It has been evident from the beginning as to what is soon to happen, that being his withdrawal or defeat in the fight for Democratic candidacy. And the reason why is very simple: Howard Dean is not a modern Democrat.
Democrats after Reagan are very interesting. Fighting hard against the Conservative Republican sway that took hold of the country, they were forced to make sacrifices in order to get elected and stay there. They have gradually drifted towards the middle, taking much of the fire out of the party which once was home to the originators of social reform. Modern Democrats are no longer concerned with making the world a better place. Granted, they are not quite as hell bent as Republicans are with maintaining the status quo, but they aren’t exactly in this thing for radical change.
This creates a problem, because Howard Dean’s entire campaign was change. It was the liberal equivalent to Bush’s current holy war on the Middle East. It was a campaign fueled by the belief fed from his supporters into him, because they believed in his intensity, which made them believe stronger, in an endless positive feedback loop. Seeing the man speak in New York City in August, I can attest to the charge that he can give a crowd. That speech felt more like one of the rallies in Washington protesting the war than it did a forum for a politician to spew rhetoric. And that’s because Dean genuinely believed what he was saying. He and Trippi had taken their passion for the issues and crafted them into a deft political machine, working from the grassroots level, using organizing tactics worthy of any non-profit worth it’s salt.
Dean was, simply, not a modern Democratic candidate. While he started strong, most believed he would never garner much public attention, or that his message would not resonate strongly enough to raise the money needed to go forth. However, these assumptions were dead wrong. The week prior to the first caucus in Iowa, Dean was in the lead. Then something mysterious happened. Actually, it happened shortly before this, and this was the other candidates, mainly Dick Gephardt, attacking him. While the politics of running races for candidacy are obviously dicey, it was interesting to see Dean being attacked for what seemed to be nothing other than having either beliefs or rhetoric (you decide which) that resonated more strongly with the people than his opponents.
The Iowa caucus and subsequent primaries have shown that Dean’s swing out of favor is to be a permanent one. However, in Dean’s first moment of weakness, John Kerry was able to swoop in and essentially take all of Dean’s taglines, co-opting them for himself. However, now it seems like everyone, including the DNC and the media love Kerry for this. Why?
Because Kerry is that magic word, “electable”. Because in an election, you are not judged on the passion of your conviction, but rather, you are judged on your appeal to the middle. The left is going to vote Democrat and the right will vote Republican. This isn’t a blind partisanship, it’s simply the reality of how the majority of personal politics stand in America. What the representatives of the “middle of road” have realized, is that they truly hod the future for any elected official on a national level, namely the President. John Kerry has already proven himself malleable and shifty, just look at his transformation into a populist war veteran in the past month, and God only knows what he was involved in during the Big Dig in Boston. He is, simply put, a better candidate than Dean for the Democratic Party.
However, Dean is still, in the end, a better candidate for the American People. Dean represented change, and seems to have at least steered the Dems further to the left than they’ve been in years. I think Kerry stands a good chance with a run at Bush, but he needs a good running mate. Dean now serves as a sane Ralph Nader to the Democratic Party, keeping them a bit more honest, and hopefully a bit more progressive. This is how changes are made in big two party politics. The real question all along really should not have been “Will Howard Dean win the Democratic party nomination?”, but should have been “How will the Democratic Party nominee compare to Howard Dean?”
justinª