Friday, February 20, 2004
With every song comes liner notes, so its time to talk about Dean's departure. As the lyrics below would indicate, I'm glad to see it. I think he was a poor candidate and I deeply disliked his style of campaigning, which I think tapped into the inflamed liberal id. Bush-bashing is a fine way to win the Democratic primary, but not to reach a broader audience. Bashing the half of the party that supported the war in Iraq is a nice way to stabilize your support at 40%.
Dean comes from that strain of liberalism that has a hard time crediting anyone who thinks differently with having ideals. It began to show in the end of the campaign when he was calling Kerry a Republican, or when he said that Washington Democrats would scurry "like cockroaches" if he was elected. He may be a Democrat, but that sort of thing reminds me of Ralph Nader. There was the same self-righteous gleam to the whole enterprise. Like Nader, he pretended - all polling evidence to the contrary - that there was a great untapped pool of liberal nonvoters he could recruit and win with. This is pure fantasy - research on non-voters suggests that they mirror the actual spectrum of voters and do not concentrate in any one area.
The tendency to identify ideological orthodoxy with ideological purity is an ugly and self-defeating one. Democrats cannot win the country by appealing only to an ideological base. Bill Clinton understood that all too well. Howard Dean pretended to understand that, but could not really express it. When he tried to talk about appealing to a broader audience, he started riffing on people in pickup trucks with Confederate flags.
Over the course of the campaign, Dean seemed the candidate least congenial to his peers. He rocketed past them by questioning their competence over the Iraq war vote, and never could abandon this tack - indeed he tried to use it to climb past Kerry in his final months. He appropriated Paul Wellstone's classic line of representing "the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" but stopped there. He did not appropriate Wellstone's generous personality - which was what made the Minnesota senator so respected and admired by all his colleagues, even conservative Republicans. Dean seemed to enjoy being small and righteous, hammering against the half of the party that didn't agree with him. For a while it worked, but you can get away with such things during the primary season.
I liked to say a few things when he was ascendant: that he would run a bad race and have no ability to take the fight to Bush's base; and that if every senator ran like him, the Democrats would be lucky to have 30 seats in the Senate. Dean's campaign style was well-suited to liberal primary voters, but ill-suited to the general election. The promises he made to his base made him unable to adapt his campaign to circumstance - even after he began trailing Kerry, he still based his appeal on attacking Kerry. His feuding with Gephardt in Iowa was by all counts disastrous for both men.
As he faltered, he could not blame his faltering on the real doubts that his frequent venting sessions were spurring in voters. Instead, he chose to blame them on the Democratic establishment - the same establishment he was painting as inept and weak. The Democratic establishment can do a lot of things like printing its own letterhead, but it had very little to do with the fact that Iowa and New Hampshire voters took a more critical second look at Dean. If anything, it was resigning itself to having him as a frontrunner when the great shift started. Dean started hiring lobbyists to run his campaign and reaping endorsements from the likes of Al Gore. A majority of super-delegates - primary delegates who happen to be high-ranking party members - went to him. The least he could do is say thank you and consider the possibility that his personality was a part of the problem. Say what you like about Gore, but he was capable of reconfiguring his outgoing side. It didn't work, but he wasn't too proud to do it.
Moreover, Dean's attacks on the Democratic party leadership revealed both his deep self-righteousness and a real lack of generosity and understanding. The party's leadership in the Senate comes from a senator from South Dakota and another from Nevada. Both, I think, have an appreciation of the need of Democrats to compete in moderate or semi-conservative states, and both are appreciative of the difficulty of representing the states that they do as Democrats. Strange as it may seem, the Democrats have 2 senators from Arkansas, another 2 from Florida, 2 from Louisiana, 2 from West Virginia, 2 from Nebraska, 2 from the Carolinas, and a whopping 4 from the Dakotas. Howard Dean to the contrary, these senators did not get elected by carving out a position on the hard left. Their electoral viability is utterly dependent on forming coalitions of liberal, moderate, and even conservative voters. Once elected, these people may not be as liberal as a guy from Vermont could be. But it's pretty clear that we're better off with them than the alternative. Unless someone wants to start scissoring out the states of the Union that they don't like (which many liberals seem to be mentally doing) the question of winning outside of the Northeast, liberal Midwest and Pacific coast is not going away.
It's no accident that the most successful Democratic candidates of the past 50 years have been charismatic Southerners, who instinctively know how to undermine the conservative base region, while reassuring their own liberal base. Dean stood in opposition to that tradition, even as he claimed he would appeal to moderates. He claimed to understand the desire of the party, even as he misread it. Enough Democrats realized that the primary season exists to do something other than give them a five-minute catharsis: produce a viable candidate who reflects the makeup of the party. The Democratic party is the party of liberals, but it is not an overwhelmingly liberal party. We can bemoan that until the ghost of FDR visits us, but it also bears mentioning that we retrospectively make our historic standard-bearers more liberal than they actually were. FDR, Truman and the Kennedys were all moderates in some sense who managed to advance liberal goals. Kerry and Edwards better understand the makeup of the party that they represent and rather than bashing or denying that reality, they are working with it to shape a successful White House bid. Dean failed to accept what most primary voters know, and is retiring to Vermont because of it.
Dean comes from that strain of liberalism that has a hard time crediting anyone who thinks differently with having ideals. It began to show in the end of the campaign when he was calling Kerry a Republican, or when he said that Washington Democrats would scurry "like cockroaches" if he was elected. He may be a Democrat, but that sort of thing reminds me of Ralph Nader. There was the same self-righteous gleam to the whole enterprise. Like Nader, he pretended - all polling evidence to the contrary - that there was a great untapped pool of liberal nonvoters he could recruit and win with. This is pure fantasy - research on non-voters suggests that they mirror the actual spectrum of voters and do not concentrate in any one area.
The tendency to identify ideological orthodoxy with ideological purity is an ugly and self-defeating one. Democrats cannot win the country by appealing only to an ideological base. Bill Clinton understood that all too well. Howard Dean pretended to understand that, but could not really express it. When he tried to talk about appealing to a broader audience, he started riffing on people in pickup trucks with Confederate flags.
Over the course of the campaign, Dean seemed the candidate least congenial to his peers. He rocketed past them by questioning their competence over the Iraq war vote, and never could abandon this tack - indeed he tried to use it to climb past Kerry in his final months. He appropriated Paul Wellstone's classic line of representing "the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" but stopped there. He did not appropriate Wellstone's generous personality - which was what made the Minnesota senator so respected and admired by all his colleagues, even conservative Republicans. Dean seemed to enjoy being small and righteous, hammering against the half of the party that didn't agree with him. For a while it worked, but you can get away with such things during the primary season.
I liked to say a few things when he was ascendant: that he would run a bad race and have no ability to take the fight to Bush's base; and that if every senator ran like him, the Democrats would be lucky to have 30 seats in the Senate. Dean's campaign style was well-suited to liberal primary voters, but ill-suited to the general election. The promises he made to his base made him unable to adapt his campaign to circumstance - even after he began trailing Kerry, he still based his appeal on attacking Kerry. His feuding with Gephardt in Iowa was by all counts disastrous for both men.
As he faltered, he could not blame his faltering on the real doubts that his frequent venting sessions were spurring in voters. Instead, he chose to blame them on the Democratic establishment - the same establishment he was painting as inept and weak. The Democratic establishment can do a lot of things like printing its own letterhead, but it had very little to do with the fact that Iowa and New Hampshire voters took a more critical second look at Dean. If anything, it was resigning itself to having him as a frontrunner when the great shift started. Dean started hiring lobbyists to run his campaign and reaping endorsements from the likes of Al Gore. A majority of super-delegates - primary delegates who happen to be high-ranking party members - went to him. The least he could do is say thank you and consider the possibility that his personality was a part of the problem. Say what you like about Gore, but he was capable of reconfiguring his outgoing side. It didn't work, but he wasn't too proud to do it.
Moreover, Dean's attacks on the Democratic party leadership revealed both his deep self-righteousness and a real lack of generosity and understanding. The party's leadership in the Senate comes from a senator from South Dakota and another from Nevada. Both, I think, have an appreciation of the need of Democrats to compete in moderate or semi-conservative states, and both are appreciative of the difficulty of representing the states that they do as Democrats. Strange as it may seem, the Democrats have 2 senators from Arkansas, another 2 from Florida, 2 from Louisiana, 2 from West Virginia, 2 from Nebraska, 2 from the Carolinas, and a whopping 4 from the Dakotas. Howard Dean to the contrary, these senators did not get elected by carving out a position on the hard left. Their electoral viability is utterly dependent on forming coalitions of liberal, moderate, and even conservative voters. Once elected, these people may not be as liberal as a guy from Vermont could be. But it's pretty clear that we're better off with them than the alternative. Unless someone wants to start scissoring out the states of the Union that they don't like (which many liberals seem to be mentally doing) the question of winning outside of the Northeast, liberal Midwest and Pacific coast is not going away.
It's no accident that the most successful Democratic candidates of the past 50 years have been charismatic Southerners, who instinctively know how to undermine the conservative base region, while reassuring their own liberal base. Dean stood in opposition to that tradition, even as he claimed he would appeal to moderates. He claimed to understand the desire of the party, even as he misread it. Enough Democrats realized that the primary season exists to do something other than give them a five-minute catharsis: produce a viable candidate who reflects the makeup of the party. The Democratic party is the party of liberals, but it is not an overwhelmingly liberal party. We can bemoan that until the ghost of FDR visits us, but it also bears mentioning that we retrospectively make our historic standard-bearers more liberal than they actually were. FDR, Truman and the Kennedys were all moderates in some sense who managed to advance liberal goals. Kerry and Edwards better understand the makeup of the party that they represent and rather than bashing or denying that reality, they are working with it to shape a successful White House bid. Dean failed to accept what most primary voters know, and is retiring to Vermont because of it.
