THE CLEANEST punch that Dick Cheney landed on John Edwards during last week’s vice-presidential debate came when he invoked the half-forgotten name of Howard Dean. The Vice-President gibed that John Kerry had withdrawn his support in the Senate for funding American troops in Iraq because Dean, the anti-war candidate for the Democratic nomination, was riding high in the polls. If Kerry could not stand up to Howard Dean, he argued, how could he be expected to stand up to alQaeda? It was a good line but also a reminder of how close Howard Dean once was to seizing the Democratic nomination on an unequivocally anti-Iraq war agenda.
When I visit Dean in his modest offices in Vermont, the modest state where he was Governor for 11 years, it all seems a long time ago. Short, white-haired at 55 — his only physical assets are his strikingly blue eyes — he looks, in his tieless striped shirt, jeans and trainers, like your neighbour, not your president. His spin-doctors look like your neighbour’s kids. Yet at this time last year the former family doctor was on his way to recruiting an army of 500,000 e-mail supporters, raising $41 million in campaign funds and attracting 3,500 volunteers to storm-troop Iowa where, by a quirk of the electoral system, a caucus would have been the first and, as it turned out, definitive say on who should run against Bush.
Riding high on public outrage against the President, Dean was the Democratic front-runner, but one who, when the Iowan decision-makers met in January, ended third behind Kerry and Edwards. He limped on, but his campaign effectively ended that night — and not with a whimper, but a scream, a primal yelp of defiance intended to gee-up his supporters.
“Well, the most interesting thing about the scream speech,” says Dean, “was that it never really happened the way it was shown. The reporters who were there never thought much about it.” Fitted with a one-directional microphone to cut out the noise of the crowd, who in reality were yelling louder than he was, Dean appeared to viewers, however, to be shouting to himself. On the cable news channels, right-wing commentators called Dean “insane ” and “finished”.
“And neither is true,” he deadpans, and the curious thing is that even in defeat Dean has not stopped running and, like Kerry, now represents an alternative to a Clintonite Democratic Party past and future. As his presidential dreams retreated, he morphed his campaign into a movement called Democracy for America. Dean insists that his personal political ambitions are not over; he just does not know what form they will take. In the meantime Democracy for America campaigns for a Kerry victory, with its founder travelling six days a week to speaker meetings and fortnightly phoning advice to the candidate (advice that he keeps private).
Back at its base near Dean’s colonial home in Burlington, Vermont, three middle-aged women volunteers work online, badgering Dean’s e-mail constituency. Their message, aside from “don’t panic about the polls”, is that Democracy for America is supporting Democratic candidates in 1,000 races on November 2. Deaniacs will be standing for everything from dog catcher to Congress.
Their manual is Dean’s new book You Have the Power: How to Take Back our Country and Restore Democracy in America. Resembling a self-help manual, it has an outside chance of being the best legacy of the Democrats’ general election campaign. Its message adds up to the simple truth that in a democracy ordinary people can change things. It is not enough, however, just to vote. “Voting,” Dean scolds, “gets you a D if you want to live in a healthy democracy.” To get an A you must volunteer to help a candidate and contribute financially. To get an A-plus you have to run for something yourself. “If ordinary Americans like you don’t run, people from the Right wing or Christian Coalition will. That’s how we got where we are now.” I pick up my copy in New York. The young man behind the counter says it is “too bad” that Dean is not still in the contest. He will be voting for Kerry, but reluctantly since “it’s clear” that Kerry is not an anti-war candidate. “I don’t think John was ever the anti-war candidate,” Dean responds in that slightly abrupt way that lost him more friends among journalists than he could afford earlier this year.
“The issue is the credibility of the President. That’s why everybody is spending so much time on Iraq. The debate is not about whether we should be there or shouldn’t be there, although I think most Americans now think it wasn’t worth it that we went in. The debate is about whether the President is a truthful person or not. I think that’s why John is spending so much time on Iraq.
“People have already decided they prefer not to, by a small margin, re-elect the President. If you look at how many people think the country’s going in the wrong direction it’s significant and it’s a majority. So they’ve already decided they’d be better off with a different president. Now the next decision they have to make is whether John Kerry is the one to replace him, and that’s what John has to show.”
Having read Dean’s book, I wonder if being a Democrat isn’t something of a handicap for Kerry. “I don’t think so. Why would you even ask such a thing?” Because his account makes clear the scale of his own party’s failure. After a 40-year spell in control of Congress they had failed by 1994 “to make good on our stated aim of sticking up for ordinary people”, not least by failing to meet Harry Truman’s call for universal healthcare. Dean looks almost embarrassed by the severity of his critique.
“I think that’s principally because the Democrats were in power for so long. I mean, I think we’re a lot different than they were then and I think we’re going to continue to evolve. We need to be a much hungrier group of people with some discipline.”
According to Dean’s thesis, during their decades in power the party’s senators and congressmen lost touch with their constituencies beyond the Washington beltway: they didn’t fund or support Democrats in local races, ignored their trade union base and came out of the Nineties as much a party of big business as the Republicans. Their rhetoric grew remote from ordinary voters: at the 1980 Convention, for instance, potential Carter supporters were driven away by talk of drug legalisation and punitive taxes: “The Republicans,” he writes, “have beaten us at every turn in the battle for Americans’ hearts and minds.”
