By then, Meetups were in full flower, and even though there still wasn't much of a Dean presence in New Jersey, we sat in various Panera Bread locations hand-writing letters to Iowa voters. And lo and behold, it started to look like our guy might actually make it; that instead of yet another quixotic campaign by a guy with no chance. Then Dick Gephardt and John Kerry pooled their resources to tag-team him in Iowa by running negative ads. And by the time the actual Iowa caucuses came around, Dean's inexperienced field operation, combined with a media bound and determined to see him fail; the way they turned down the background crowd noise during his rally for his young workers after losing the caucuses to make it sound like he was unhinged, the Dean Dream was over.
On the campaign trail this year, Joe Biden got crowds riled up by talking about how his father used to tell him that when the bully knocks you down, you get up. Well, Howard Dean got up, and with the help of his youthful following and the blogosphere that supported him, ran for, and won,the chairmanship of the DNC. In October 2006, Matt Bai wrote about Dean's tenure and how he put his 50-state strategy to work at the DNC. If you wondered whatever happened to Dean and why you so rarely saw him, this article will tell you what he was very quietly doing while people like Rahm Emanuel thought the "can't win, don't try" strategy in states outside the northeast and California strategy was just dandy:
For the Democrats, winning presidential elections came to mean doing so without any help from the South or West, and that, in turn, meant cobbling together a relatively small number of so-called battleground states rather than running a truly national campaign. The D.N.C. quit doing much of anything in conservative rural states, and the party’s presidential candidates didn’t bother stopping by on their way to more promising terrain. Every four years, the national party became obsessed with “targeting” — that is, focusing all its efforts on 15 or 20 winnable urban states and pounding them with expensive TV ads. The D.N.C.’s defining purpose was to raise the money for those ads. The national party became, essentially, a service organization for a few hundred wealthy donors, who treated it like their private political club.
None of this was much on Howard Dean’s mind when he set about running for president in 2003 with drab notions of health-care reform and a balanced budget; by the time he made his infamous “scream” speech in Des Moines a year later, however, Dean had become a folk hero for marginalized liberals. How this happened has been largely misunderstood. Dean has been credited with inciting an Internet-driven rebellion against his own party, but, in fact, he was more the accidental vehicle of a movement that was already emerging. The rise of Moveon.org, blogs and “meet-ups” was powered to some extent by the young, tech-savvy activists on both coasts who were so closely associated in the public mind with Dean’s campaign. But the fast-growing Internet community was also a phenomenon of liberal enclaves in more conservative states, where disenchanted Democrats, mostly baby boomers, had long felt outnumbered and abandoned. Meet-ups for Dean drew overflow crowds in Austin, Tex., and Birmingham, Ala.; what the Web did was to connect disparate groups of Democratic voters who didn’t live in targeted states and who had watched helplessly as Republicans overran their communities. These Democrats opposed the war in Iraq, but they were also against a party that seemed to care more about big donors and swing states than it did about them. Attracted to Dean’s fiery defiance of the Washington establishment, these voters adopted him as their cause before he had ever heard of a blog.
“What our campaign was about, not that I set out to make it this way, was empowering people,” Dean told me recently. “The ‘you have the power’ stuff — that just arose spontaneously when I realized what incredible potential there was for people to get active who had given up on the political process because they didn’t think either party was helping them.”
Later in the article, Bai reports on how Dean ran up against Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer:
Before this midterm election-year began, but not long after Dean became party head, Emanuel and Schumer decided that if Dean wasn’t going to raise anywhere near as much money as his rivals at Republican headquarters, then he ought to at least give them whatever resources he could muster. They went to work on Dean, pleading with him to transfer as much as $10 million to the two committees to help them respond to the Republican TV barrage. Emanuel told anyone who would listen that back in 1994, when Republicans sensed a similarly historic mood swing in the electorate, the R.N.C. kicked in something like $20 million in cash to its Congressional committees. (This argument was impressive, but not exactly true; the R.N.C. spent roughly that much on federal and local races combined in 1994, and little, if any, of that money went directly to the committees themselves.) Dean categorically refused to ante up. Having opposed the very idea of targeting a small number of states and races, he wasn’t about to divert money from his long-term strategy — what he calls the “unsexy” work of rebuilding the party’s infrastructure — to pay for a bunch of TV ads in Ohio. He wanted to win the 2006 elections as much as anyone, Dean told them, and he intended to help where he could. But Democratic candidates and their campaign committees were doing just fine on fund-raising, and the party couldn’t continue giving in to the temptation to spend everything it had on every election cycle — no matter how big a checkbook the Republicans were waving around.
For Schumer, Emanuel and their allies, this rejection was irritating enough. When they heard the stories of how Dean was actually spending the party’s cash, however, it was almost more than they could take. Dean was paying for four organizers in Mississippi, where there wasn’t a single close House race, but he had sent only three new hires to Pennsylvania, which had a governor’s race, a Senate campaign and four competitive House races. Emanuel said he was all for expanding the party’s reach into rural states — roughly half the House seats he was targeting were in states like Texas, Indiana and Kentucky, after all — but he wanted the D.N.C. to focus on individual districts that Democrats could actually win, as opposed to just spreading money around aimlessly. The D.N.C. was spending its money not only in Alaska and Hawaii, but in the U.S. Virgin Islands as well. Democratic insiders began to rail against this wacky and expensive 50-state plan. “He says it’s a long-term strategy,” Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said during an appearance on CNN in May. “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”
Just like a couple of corporate executives, only concerned about getting through the next quarter without regard to the long term. But the Emanuel/Schumer hackocracy seemed content to lose election after election, rather than change strategy:
Underneath this clash of field plans and alpha personalities lay a deeper philosophical divide over how you go about rebuilding a party — which was really a dispute about cause and effect. Did you expand the party by winning elections, or did you win elections by expanding the party? Most party insiders had long put their faith in elections first, arguing that the best way to broaden the base of the party was to win more races. Schumer said as much in a written statement that his spokesman forwarded to me in response to my questions about his differences with Dean. “Our long-term goal is the same — a strong Democratic Party,” Schumer stated. “But we” — meaning he and Emanuel — “believe that nothing does more to further that goal in 2006, 2008 and beyond than taking back the House and Senate so that we can implement a Democratic platform.”
Recent history, though, would seem to undercut this theory. In the 1990’s, the Democrats won two presidential elections behind a popular leader, and yet the party didn’t grow. In fact, Democrats lost ground at every level of government except the White House and cemented their position as the party of coastal states. Steadily investing in political activity on the local level, as Republicans have done for years, seems to Dean and his allies a more realistic way for Democrats to expand the electoral map than simply trying, every four years, to piece together the same elusive majorities. Of course, every Democrat in Washington says he’s for expanding the party’s efforts beyond the familiar 18 or 20 battleground states, but only Dean, among his party’s leaders, has been willing to argue that there is a choice involved, that you cannot actually invest for the long term unless you’re willing to forgo some short-term priorities.
Of course, as it turned out, the Democrats did gain significant victories in 2006, and Rahm Emanuel was quick to claim credit, despite his most high-profile blunder -- passing over the popular Christine Cegelis in IL-6 in favor of moving Tammy Duckworth into the district as a "sure-win" candidate, despite the fact that she was completely unknown in the district, because as an Iraq War veteran who left both legs in the sands of Iraq, she would be "attack-proof." Obviously Rahmmy had learned nothing from John Kerry's loss in 2004.
But Dean is in his own way as tough a customer as Emanuel, and continued to go about the business of growing the Democratic party and making it competitive in as many states as possible. And last Tuesday, we saw the results.
Yes, we had an extraordinarily charismatic candidate, but let's not forget how he had defeated the candidate of Emanuel and Schumer and the others who would continue a losing strategy in perpetuity. Let's not forget how Barack Obama, along with Davids Plouffe and Axelrod, took the infrastructure that Howard Dean started in 2004 and continued to build as DNC chair, ran with it, and perfected it into not just a money machine of small donors, but an electoral one as well. Where Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer would have written off Florida, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia, the Obama team went in there full-bore. "Can't win, don't try" wasn't part of their vocabulary. And while the candidate and his campaign certainly deserve much of the credit, it's hard to imagine the Obama campaign model being successful against the Clinton Big Money Machine in the primaries and against the mighty RNC in the general election without the work of Howard Dean, quietly building Democratic organizations in these states and not taking "no" for an answer when asked if Democrats could possibly win these states.
Now Dr. Dean is stepping down, living up to his pledge to only serve one term as DNC chair. I wish he were staying, but if we know the good doctor, he has something else up his sleeve. We can only hope so. We can ill afford to lose a visionary like Howard Dean on the public stage.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire