Wisconsin Farewell: A Dean Retrospective

By Mark Engler, AlterNet. Posted February 17, 2004.

Howard Dean announced Wednesday that he would be ending his presidential campaign. The announcement capped what has been a brutal month for the Vermonter who would be president. It seems hard to remember those days before the January 19 Iowa caucuses, when the Dean train was full of steam and on a track set for the White House.

Having never recovered from his severe Midwestern derailment, Dean told his supporters in early February that Wisconsin would be the end unless he won the state's primaries. He wavered on that promise, but ultimately held to it after ranking a distant third in the polls and facing the departure of top aides. Thus, now is a good time to take stock of the campaign that was once bound for glory.

Too many in the media have been overjoyed to dance on the grave of the Dean insurgency, attributing the candidate's failure in hindsight to poor policy positions and inherent weaknesses as a campaigner. However, the cynics don't offer a lot of insight into the campaign's dramatic reversal of fortune. And they fail to give Dean his due -- to appreciate the candidate's contributions to reviving a moribund Party and creating one of the most compelling Democratic primaries in decades.

So why did the Dean campaign fall apart? And what lessons can we learn?

First off, money matters. I was in Iowa in January, and it was notable how markedly local perspectives differed from those elsewhere in the country. Iowans actually took seriously candidates like Gephardt and Edwards, who on the coasts were considered irrelevant. Why did Iowans take them seriously? Because the candidates spent serious time -- and even more serious money -- campaigning in the state. While on the national scene Dean looked unbeatable, the race was much tighter in places where the airtime had been purchased and the campaign literature mailed.

The second lesson is that negative campaigning works -- as a destructive force, at least. John Edwards points to his hopeful, upbeat message as the key to his surprise success in Iowa. It's true that it kept him clear of the mudslinging. But the fact that frontrunners Gephardt and Dean each spent considerable fortunes heckling each other down no doubt had much to do their failures at the polls. Again, the impact of the attack ads, or at least the omnipresence of them, was much more evident in Iowa than in places where the negative glossies were not showing up in the mail every day.

The dual power of money and mud will be important to remember in the coming months. Although President Bush has had a couple of bad weeks, a tarnished image is nothing that $200 million can't fix. And something tells me that Karl Rove's hatchet men won't be listening to Edwards' advice about taking the moral high ground when they go up against John Kerry.

Dean supporters generally cite unfair coverage of "The Scream" dooming their candidate in New Hampshire and beyond. But Kerry was sure to get a big boost from his Iowa victory regardless, and Dean to suffer from his poor third-place showing. Later revelations that the governor had squandered almost all the plunder from his war chest was enough to dash hopes for a true national strategy. Complaints about press coverage harping on the "angry" Dean may be legitimate, but managing reporters is part and parcel of making the tricky move from challenger to frontrunner. A Dean campaign that lived by national media momentum was all too ready to die by it.

Then there is the pundits' favorite explanation for the governor's downfall: "electability." Howard Dean himself has rightly pointed out that this is a fickle concept. January polls showed him as by far the most likely Democrat to beat Bush, and electability was often cited in his favor. Meanwhile, as the Kerry campaign languished throughout most of 2003, the Senator was widely considered too aloof, too Northeastern, and too much of a Washington insider to beat Bush.

Besides, this discussion ignores the manner in which Dean has transformed the meaning of "electability." Historian and journalist Rick Perlstein perceptively writes in the Village Voice that "thanks to Dean, the definition has changed from the last time it was so ubiquitously heard: In the 1990s, when the word was enough to give any dyed-in-the-wool liberal a shudder, it served as a stand-in for 'politically skilled but ideologically timid.' Now, it means both 'politically skilled' and 'eager to kick George Walker Bush's ass.'"

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