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Howard, We Never Knew YeDean's biggest mistake was to run as a fake populist instead of as himself.
By Timothy NoahPosted Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2004, at 7:46 PM ET
The trouble with the Howard Dean who today ended his candidacy for president wasn't that he was too liberal, or too crazy, or too much of a Washington outsider to win the Democratic nomination. The trouble was that he didn't exist.
Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was a sensible and decent centrist politician whose greatest asset in a potential match-up with President Bush was his record of fiscal conservatism. Indeed, after Sen. Bob Graham, a former Florida governor, departed the race, Dean was the only major Democratic presidential candidate with any substantial management experience at all, unless you counted Gen. Wesley Clark, whose military experience didn't translate well into the political realm, and Dennis Kucinich, who as mayor of Cleveland two decades earlier had presided over its default. Both Clark and Kucinich had been fired from their big management jobs, Clark by Defense Secretary William Cohen and Kucinich by an overwhelming majority of Cleveland voters. Dean, by contrast, had served successfully as Vermont governor for a decade.
Dean had inherited a $65 million deficit from his two liberal predecessors and wiped it out within three years, mainly by cutting spending—not the "rate of spending growth" but the spending itself. Nationally, he'd pointed out the need to limit increases in Medicare spending and to raise the Social Security retirement age, two fiscally responsible positions that he repudiated last year after being attacked by candidate Dick Gephardt. This set a pattern for the Dean campaign. He would distance himself from moderate positions he'd taken as governor, often with an untruthful denial that he'd ever held the position in question, and take a more populist and irresponsible stance instead. In time, this created a hugely popular hologram that purported to be Howard Dean.
Some of the "left-liberal" positions the hologram trumpeted during the campaign were entirely in tune with the real Howard Dean. It was a sober impulse, not a radical one, to oppose sending troops into Iraq while Osama Bin Laden remained at large. Similarly, by supporting civil unions for homosexuals, Dean simply reiterated the support he'd given the nation's first civil union law while governor. As has been widely been noted, lending government sanction to longterm single-sex relationships was a fundamentally conservative gesture.
But much of the hologram's leftism—for instance, his disavowal of the North American Free Trade Agreement—seemed patently insincere. The hologram's cheapest and most alarming statement was his Dec. 1 suggestion on TheDiane Rehm Show that President Bush had been warned in advance by the Saudis about the Sept. 11 attacks. Conservative commentators correctly pointed out that it was difficult to distinguish this remark from the one that had brought universal condemnation to Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., who lost her seat as a result. You can probably trace the unraveling of Dean's campaign to his 9/11 comment. Chatterbox, who was halfway through a Slate column disputing the Washington establishment's notion that, if nominated, Howard Dean would bring the Democrats McGovern-like defeat, lost all confidence in this argument and abandoned it. Even George McGovern, who had seemed to be edging toward a Dean endorsement, threw his support instead to Wesley Clark.
In announcing his withdrawal from the race, the hologram pretended that Dean's failure was due to the "enormous institutional pressure in our country against change." The real Howard Dean surely knows better. It's true that the establishment media made far too much of Dean's untelegenic speech to his supporters after his Iowa defeat and of his wife's reluctance to play the Barbie doll spouse on the campaign trail. (It subsequently repented on the latter point but stuck to its guns on the former.) But the hologram's real problem wasn't that Dean sounded too angry or too far left. It was that he was getting harder and harder to believe.
Dean's influence on the presidential contest will be much discussed in coming days, and certainly it's true that the other candidates have been wise to accommodate themselves more fully to the World Wide Web, from which the hologram harvested a fortune in small donations. But John Kerry, who's worked hard to co-opt the hologram's phony populism, might want to rethink his strategy. Kerry makes an even less convincing populist than Dean, and the press and the Bush White House have already started calling him on it. Kerry would do better to be himself. The real John Kerry is nowhere near as appealing as the real Howard Dean, but he's a lot easier to like than the phony Kerry—or, for that matter, the phony Dean.
Howard, We Never Knew Ye: Dean's biggest mistake was to run as a fake populist instead of as himself.
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
Photograph of Howard Dean by Brian Snyder/Reuters.
COMMENTS
Remarks from the Fray:
…Howard Dean the man deserves more credit than Dean the Hologram, as Mr. Noah styles him. Yes, some of his positions were not smart ones and should serve as reminders to the candidates who remain. (I am thinking in particular at the moment of John Edwards's sudden Ross Perot-like anti-NAFTA rhetoric.) There was nothing all that terribly unique in what Dean was saying, as compared to his rivals. But while the rest of them tended to retreat into their comfort zones, Dean is at least admirable for courageously and obstinately moving away from his own in favor of what he thought was right and what the country desperately needed. It was ultimately the voters' desire for something with which they could be more comfortable that caused his downfall.
Here is the passage from [E.M. Forster's] Howard's End that I think captures best both what "went wrong" as well as Dean's lasting legacy.
It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don't fret yourself . . . Develop what you have . . .
A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences, eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be color; sorrow perhaps, but color in the daily gray.
Dean is far from ended, of course … But even should he never rise to national prominence again, the worst that can be said of Howard Dean's burst bubble is not that voters began to see him as bad but merely as too good to be true. There is certain nobility in missing because you aimed too high with which Dean and his supporters may comfort themselves. And while that quality will never pass practical muster in a candidate, it is a very fine quality indeed to remain rooted in the spirit of a Party and of a nation.
Dean tried to combat what he saw as an unfortunate movement in American politics. He was washed overboard in the turbulence of crashing against that wave. I personally never saw him as a good candidate but I have to admire the spirit of vitality he injected into the political process as well as his eternal optimism about the potential for this country as a positive agent for change within the world…
Whether or not you agree with the voters' assessment, there seems little doubt that Kerry trumped Dean because of his perceived "electability." This perception, however, was inevitable given Dean's attempt to identify with core Democratic voters. Ironically, Dean's very embrace of these voters provided a mirror for them, and it wasn't a pleasant sight. The recoil from that brought Dean's candidacy down more than anything else.
…George W. Bush is the new Clinton, and the Democrats are the new Republicans. That's what Howard Dean tapped into, to generate his "bubble" of money and support. He adapted to mirror the feelings of core Democrats-- but it turned out it wasn't ideas he adopted, but a persona. Dean was "angry" and "pugnacious" and "combative" and all those other adjectives because he was trying to appeal to Democrats seething with a deep, gut-level hatred of George Bush. People who would give their front teeth for a baseball bat and 10 minutes alone with Bush in a locked room. Dean gave a voice to their hatred. He made it his defining characteristic. "I opposed the war while Kerry voted for it," was a euphemism for "I hated George Bush as much as you did, while Kerry was cozying up to him."
But at some point, Democrats couldn't stand that kind of public exposure of an ugly part of themselves. What they saw wasn't 1972-- when simply not enough people agreed with their ideas-- it was 1996, when Republicans let their hatred boil out into public view. Hatred is a powerful weapon, and it's infectious; I don't pretend it's not. When you have enough people hating, you can sometimes get the "where there's smoke there's fire" effect. But even though hating is an effective tool, it's not supposed to be on the surface. Dean was too in-your-face with it, and he was blowing their cover. So began the push to get someone "electable" instead of this "angry" candidate. They didn't want to get rid of the hate, just its public face.
Democrats have an excellent chance to win this election. And their hatred has more influence than the 1996 Republicans because it is shared by more prominent people, particularly in the entertainment industry (of which the media is a subset). But not with Dean. He succeeded too well in mirroring the mood of the Democratic faithful, and it wasn't a pretty sight. The mirror cracked.
The bottom line on Howard Dean's popularity is that it never had anything to do with Dean himself. Not him, not his background, not his personality, and not his position on the issues.
What powered Dean's rise to political prominence was the fact that he was the first person to give all the Democratic rage and disaffection floating around on the Internet a place to go.
The one really appealing thing about Dean, in the minds of me and my friends, was that he seemed to despise the Bush Administration as much as we did, and (even better) was more than willing to say so, loudly and in public, whenever a camera was pointed in his direction.
I sent Dean $50.00 in the middle of last year. It was the first political donation I'd ever made to any political candidate or cause. I didn't send the money because I was so hot to see Dean become President; I sent him the money because I felt confident that Dean would find some way to use it to make the Administration uncomfortable.
Come the primary season, though. . . Democrats (me included) were a lot more interested in finding a candidate who could actually win the election.
Dean's fall ultimately stems from the same cause as Dean's rise: the intense, unwavering desire of just about every Democrat in the country to see Bush lose his job.
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The trouble with the Howard Dean who today ended his candidacy for president wasn't that he was too liberal, or too crazy, or too much of a Washington outsider to win the Democratic nomination. The trouble was that he didn't exist.
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Remarks from the Fray:
…Howard Dean the man deserves more credit than Dean the Hologram, as Mr. Noah styles him. Yes, some of his positions were not smart ones and should serve as reminders to the candidates who remain. (I am thinking in particular at the moment of John Edwards's sudden Ross Perot-like anti-NAFTA rhetoric.) There was nothing all that terribly unique in what Dean was saying, as compared to his rivals. But while the rest of them tended to retreat into their comfort zones, Dean is at least admirable for courageously and obstinately moving away from his own in favor of what he thought was right and what the country desperately needed. It was ultimately the voters' desire for something with which they could be more comfortable that caused his downfall.
Here is the passage from [E.M. Forster's] Howard's End that I think captures best both what "went wrong" as well as Dean's lasting legacy.
It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don't fret yourself . . . Develop what you have . . .
A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences, eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be color; sorrow perhaps, but color in the daily gray.
Dean is far from ended, of course … But even should he never rise to national prominence again, the worst that can be said of Howard Dean's burst bubble is not that voters began to see him as bad but merely as too good to be true. There is certain nobility in missing because you aimed too high with which Dean and his supporters may comfort themselves. And while that quality will never pass practical muster in a candidate, it is a very fine quality indeed to remain rooted in the spirit of a Party and of a nation.
Dean tried to combat what he saw as an unfortunate movement in American politics. He was washed overboard in the turbulence of crashing against that wave. I personally never saw him as a good candidate but I have to admire the spirit of vitality he injected into the political process as well as his eternal optimism about the potential for this country as a positive agent for change within the world…
--The_Bell
(To reply, click here)
Whether or not you agree with the voters' assessment, there seems little doubt that Kerry trumped Dean because of his perceived "electability." This perception, however, was inevitable given Dean's attempt to identify with core Democratic voters. Ironically, Dean's very embrace of these voters provided a mirror for them, and it wasn't a pleasant sight. The recoil from that brought Dean's candidacy down more than anything else.
…George W. Bush is the new Clinton, and the Democrats are the new Republicans. That's what Howard Dean tapped into, to generate his "bubble" of money and support. He adapted to mirror the feelings of core Democrats-- but it turned out it wasn't ideas he adopted, but a persona. Dean was "angry" and "pugnacious" and "combative" and all those other adjectives because he was trying to appeal to Democrats seething with a deep, gut-level hatred of George Bush. People who would give their front teeth for a baseball bat and 10 minutes alone with Bush in a locked room. Dean gave a voice to their hatred. He made it his defining characteristic. "I opposed the war while Kerry voted for it," was a euphemism for "I hated George Bush as much as you did, while Kerry was cozying up to him."
But at some point, Democrats couldn't stand that kind of public exposure of an ugly part of themselves. What they saw wasn't 1972-- when simply not enough people agreed with their ideas-- it was 1996, when Republicans let their hatred boil out into public view. Hatred is a powerful weapon, and it's infectious; I don't pretend it's not. When you have enough people hating, you can sometimes get the "where there's smoke there's fire" effect. But even though hating is an effective tool, it's not supposed to be on the surface. Dean was too in-your-face with it, and he was blowing their cover. So began the push to get someone "electable" instead of this "angry" candidate. They didn't want to get rid of the hate, just its public face.
Democrats have an excellent chance to win this election. And their hatred has more influence than the 1996 Republicans because it is shared by more prominent people, particularly in the entertainment industry (of which the media is a subset). But not with Dean. He succeeded too well in mirroring the mood of the Democratic faithful, and it wasn't a pretty sight. The mirror cracked.
--HLS2003
(To reply, click here)
The bottom line on Howard Dean's popularity is that it never had anything to do with Dean himself. Not him, not his background, not his personality, and not his position on the issues.
What powered Dean's rise to political prominence was the fact that he was the first person to give all the Democratic rage and disaffection floating around on the Internet a place to go.
The one really appealing thing about Dean, in the minds of me and my friends, was that he seemed to despise the Bush Administration as much as we did, and (even better) was more than willing to say so, loudly and in public, whenever a camera was pointed in his direction.
I sent Dean $50.00 in the middle of last year. It was the first political donation I'd ever made to any political candidate or cause. I didn't send the money because I was so hot to see Dean become President; I sent him the money because I felt confident that Dean would find some way to use it to make the Administration uncomfortable.
Come the primary season, though. . . Democrats (me included) were a lot more interested in finding a candidate who could actually win the election.
Dean's fall ultimately stems from the same cause as Dean's rise: the intense, unwavering desire of just about every Democrat in the country to see Bush lose his job.
--Thrasymachus
(To reply, click here)
(2/19)