North America
America - Andrew Stephen screams for Howard Dean
Published 14 February 2005
Howard Dean, unlike Clinton and Kerry, doesn't wait for focus groups to tell him what to do - he just says he hates Republicans. He could lead the Democrats into a bright new era
There is a hint of spring in the air in Washington these days, and that may be why I am suddenly seized with optimism about the Democratic Party. I can't help feeling, against the flow of what everybody else is saying, that we are about to see it entering a much more successful era. Indeed, I suspect the dreadful complacency of the Clinton years, the flawed candidature of Al Gore and the incompetent campaign of John Kerry may soon be forgotten after a meeting here on 12 February.
As I write, it seems likely that a majority of the 447 delegates representing the Democratic national party will vote to elect none other than Howard Dean as the new party chairman. Dean, lest we forget, was the former family doctor and governor of Vermont who emerged from obscurity in 2003 and became the front-running candidate for the 2004 presidential nomination - until the party lost its collective nerve and went instead for the supposedly safe choice, John Kerry. If elected, Dean will become the Democrats' most public face, flying across the country at weekends to raise money for the party.
He had a three-hour dinner the other night with Terry McAuliffe, the outgoing party chairman, at Cafe Milano - a stone's throw from where I live in Georgetown, and a newly fashionable venue for political power meals. McAuliffe raised a lot of money and reorganised the party's computerised mass communications after he took office in 2001, but is otherwise a leftover from the Clinton era: a self-described "entrepreneur" and lawyer who has made huge amounts of money for himself, but who entirely lacks political bite and spontaneity, and as a result has been largely unknown to the public.
The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party here is not unlike that for the Labour Party: the consensus among the senior apparatchiks is that it can win power again only by moving even further to the right, to a Clintonian vista of focus group-inspired opportunism, rather than political conviction. In contrast, most party activists identify with the more red-blooded Dean ("I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for") and his willingness to confront political opposition (George W Bush is "the least competent president of our lifetime").
The consensus wisdom is that Dean will alienate Middle America and even further marginalise the Democrats. This is partly sustained by the media myth of his "scream" in the Iowa primaries. In fact, the "scream" came when he was rallying supporters in a very noisy hall through a directional microphone that amplified his voice and screened out background noise. In the hall itself, his "scream" sounded like normal political rhetoric.
In that campaign, Dean proved to be a whizz at raising money via small contributions on the internet: he brought in $3.5m for Democrat candidates, even after he dropped out himself. The Democrats, indeed, raised more money during the 2004 election campaign than the Republicans - $389.8m against $385.3m (these are the party totals and not those of the separate Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards campaigns).
So Dean could well pilot the Democrats into an exciting new era: he says he sees the Democrats as "the party of reform . . . reforming America's financial situation, reforming our electoral process, reforming healthcare, reforming education and putting morality back in our foreign policy". Unlike Clinton, Gore or Kerry, he does not wait for focus groups to tell him what to say. He is inspired not by Clintonism, but rather by the insurgency of Newt Gingrich and the "Christian Coalition" in the early 1990s.
But a Dean chairmanship carries dangers. The Republicans amassed mountains of dirt on him last year; in particular, they zeroed in on how he won a medical exemption from military service and then went skiing for months. He has some personal skeletons, too. And he will need to forge good relationships with Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid - the Democrat leaders in the House and Senate and a deeply uninspiring pair.
Then there is the question of the 2008 Democratic candidate: Dean, if he is party chairman, in effect rules himself out. Though another wild card could emerge - such as Mark Warner, the 50-year-old governor of Virginia - the likely main candidates are the former senator John Edwards (taking the blow-dried, focus-group approach); Hillary Clinton (brighter than her husband, I've always thought); John Kerry (he is doomed, I am sure); and, yes, a resurrected Al Gore (who I would still prefer to Kerry).
My oh my, as Donald Rumsfeld would say. Not an exciting prospect. But spring is just about here, and you do not need to eat Cafe Milano's excellent paillard de veau to sense that Dean may bring some excitement and backbone to the Democrats. The least we can do is keep our fingers crossed.
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