Marginalized

By the time the dozen or so San Diego Howard Dean supporters began arriving at McGregor's Grill & Ale House last Monday evening to watch the Iowa caucus results on the big-screen TV, Dean's poor showing was a foregone conclusion-the pundits had already projected a dismal, third-place finish for the mercurial presidential candidate.

Sitting at the back bar, Charlie Imes, one of Dean's San Diego campaign leaders, took a cell phone call.

“How's he doing?” Imes repeated the caller's question. “He's in third place. It's not going so good. But there's a lot of states left.”

Imes, a bearded, solidly built Clairemont resident, a financial planner by trade, literally wandered into the local Dean campaign last year and now handles media inquiries and helps coordinate the famous Dean meetups in San Diego. Like many Dean supporters, he describes himself politically in terms of his distaste for George W. Bush. (He tried to like the President, Imes said, but he hasn't had much success-for him, the Iraq invasion crossed the line.)

Thanks to Iowa's caucus participants, the event at McGregor's was low-key. Over beers and pub grub, the Dean crew discussed what went wrong and responded to the images and sounds emanating from the television.

Marsha Johnston, a freelance journalist who lives in Hillcrest, was dumbfounded by numbers flashing across the screen that showed the surging John Kerry polling much better than Dean among Iowa's anti-war contingent. It made absolutely no sense to her-Dean's pre-Iowa national polling success was largely attributed to his stance against the Iraq invasion.

Supporters here and elsewhere began realizing that Dean's base of voters is not as big as once thought and that undecided voters appear to be deciding not to side with Dean. It's the hangover after the months-long party that was Dean's phenomenal rise in the national consciousness. Well-documented is the Dean campaign's groundbreaking use of Internet blogs and mass e-mail blasts to raise awareness and, more importantly, money. Dean sprinted from national obscurity to Democratic frontrunner in light-speed and finished out 2003 with roughly $40 million in contributions in the bank. The fact that his average contribution was only $75 thrilled and amazed the press, which fawned over Dean's Midas-touch campaign and anointed him the assured Democratic nominee before the first vote was cast. The “$100 revolution”-an effective Dean slogan-had been won.

But a funny thing happened to Dean on the way to the White House. The national press-newspaper columnists and TV prognosticators-turned on him.

Some say it started in December. Dean's statement that the world wasn't any safer with Saddam Hussein behind bars was just one of the so-called “gaffes” for which the press hounded him. Never mind that most of the comments were true and accurate.

The feeding frenzy continued in Iowa, where someone dug up a statement Dean made four years ago-that the Iowa caucuses were controlled by extremists on the right and the left-which, again, was true.

In Iowa, Dean was portrayed as an angry man, which is as false as the claim that he is a liberal.

But Dean himself was largely responsible for labeling himself liberal, and his campaign did nothing to fight the “angry” charge. In fact, the campaign aided and abetted by running negative attack ads against Dick Gephardt and by allowing him to deliver the now-infamous “concession” speech after he placed third in Iowa.

Dean chose to address a room jammed with energized supporters with an intense rallying cry in which he shouted off the names of states he would conquer-including all the home states of his opponents. As he hollered them out, his voice, ravaged by non-stop campaigning and lack of sleep, became guttural, which made him sound menacing, and he finished with a “Yeeeeeaahh” that looked and sounded like an uncontrollable, spontaneous response to his own rally.

Howard Dean excited himself.

Too much so for the mainstream press.

The reaction was swift, relentless and merciless. He was called “crazy,” “out-of-control” and “nuts.” Many of them declared his candidacy dead. One said he had administered a “lethal self-injection.” All this after just one caucus, with only 45 electoral votes at stake (California has 370). The pundits wanted Dean to be gracious in defeat. They wanted him to politely congratulate John Kerry and quietly move on to New Hampshire. They wanted him to be “presidential.”

At McGregor's that night, during the speech, one of Dean's San Diego supporters, wondered aloud: “Is that anger, or passion?”

It was the latter, reports Rick Jacobs, chairman of Dean's California campaign, who was in the room at the time.

“That room was absolutely packed with energy,” Jacobs said. Though they certainly would prefer to have won in Iowa, he added, “people were upbeat and glad to be with each other and felt a lot of camaraderie. When Gov. Dean came out, I think it was impossible for him not to feel that energy. He played to and with the energy, and it's obvious that he felt that he owed it to the people in that room to thank them and to keep them pumped up and to say let's go forward to the next state, and the next state, and the next state.”

Even some of his critics acknowledged that the speech seemed appropriate in the room, but they panned him because it played like an embarrassment on national TV. One wonders, however, how badly it would be for Dean if they simply shut up about it.

“I am really surprised at the media coverage that Dean had gotten, particularly in the week before the Iowa caucuses and after his speech to his supporters on Monday night,” commented Carole Kennedy, political science professor at San Diego State University. “There is a real bandwagon effect going on-people jumping on the bandwagon wanting to call this guy crazy.”

The whole thing reminded Kennedy of what happened to Sen. John McCain while he was campaigning in South Carolina against George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in February 2000. McCain, an “insurgency” candidate like Dean, underwent severe personal attacks after winning in New Hampshire.

The attacks on McCain were “really sort of absurd contentions,” Kennedy said, “about a very honorable, distinguished military veteran, former POW, very respected man who was for a brief time during that campaign smeared in a way that's very similar to what I see going on with the Dean candidacy right now. ‘Character assassination' is not too strong a word for what is going on.”

Addressing a lunchtime gathering of alternative-weekly journalists in San Francisco last Saturday, even Oakland Mayor and former California Gov. Jerry Brown was talking about Dean, saying the candidate was paying the price for his outsider insurgency and his unwillingness to be dull.

Brown suggested that the mainstream media decided Dean wasn't the man for president when he made the Saddam Hussein comment. All Dean did was raise a “simple, factual question” about the significance of Saddam's capture, and the press reacted as if Dean said he preferred the Iraqi villain “running free and on the loose.” Conversely, Brown said, Sen. Kerry has surged in the presidential race because, it seems, he has embraced flatness: “It doesn't appear to work for a while, but it can become quite powerful.”

After his brief talk, Mayor Brown told CityBeat that Dean is an example of what happens when someone dares to take on the establishment. “He picked on Washington, and they picked back,” he said.

What the national media doesn't know about Howard Dean is a lot.

The former Vermont governor and physician grew up amid money and privilege in New York. His was a stable, well-adjusted household on Manhattan's Park Avenue headed by his father, an ardent Republican who, like his father and grandfather before him, was a Wall Street stock broker.

As governor of Vermont, Dean was widely respected for being his own man, full of self-confidence. Observers have said that even critics of his policies acknowledged that he made his decisions based on what he truly believed was right for the people of Vermont.

Peter Freyne, a political columnist for the weekly Seven Days in Burlington, Vt., who's covered Dean throughout his career, said Dean was not beholden to anyone. “There was none of that taking-care-of-contributors stuff,” Freyne told CityBeat. “You could never buy Howard Dean.”

His staff, it's been reported, liked him because he was one of the gang, and they were extremely loyal. Dean was never in any danger of heading out on a power trip.

In Howard Dean: A Citizen's Guide to the Man Who Would Be President, a book written by nine journalists who covered Dean's political career, Hamilton E. Davis wrote: “One reporter who watched Dean over his entire tenure believes his style grows out of a truly serene self-confidence. Dean seemed to her not to need the kind of deference, indeed adulation, that is commonly sought by politicians. He's bright, successful, he grew up rich in a loving family, and he seemed totally secure about who he is.”

Freyne said flatly that Dean is far from angry.

“I, in the press, was his No. 1 critic for a long time,” he said. “He never expressed anger to me-I can tell you that as a fact. He didn't enjoy what I wrote, certainly, but he respected that it was my job to do it. There was never retribution of any kind, not even a bad vibe.”

And the “liberal” label makes Vermonters chuckle.

“There never was a sentence written in the Vermont press that had the words ‘liberal' and ‘Howard Dean' in it,” Freyne said. “So, when we're reading him described as this leftwing liberal from Vermont-What? Who?

“But,” Freyne added, “he played into it. Politics is about strategy, and there was certainly a vacuum among the presidential contenders-outside of Dennis Kucinich, god bless him-to fill that void on the left. And he took it and ran with it.”

Toying with a line from a Dean campaign speech that made the American political establishment stand up and take notice-when Dean brashly announced that he was from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party”-Freyne said that in Vermont, “Howard Dean represented the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. That's what everyone in Vermont knows. Once he took over, there was the Democratic Party and there was the Howard Dean Party.”

In truth, Dean is as middle-of-the-road as they come, and his policies, despite how he has been portrayed-and how he has portrayed himself-would be, for the most part, in line with the values of much of America, if the polls are right and Americans are fond of things like expanded access to healthcare and balanced budgets.

Republicans were comfortable with Dean, Freyne said, because “what he was doing was keeping the liberal Democrats in check in the Legislature. That was Howard Dean: balance the budget first, by whatever it takes, because the people don't trust Democrats with money, and he tried to prove the opposite, which he did in this state.”

Dean, who had been Vermont's largely invisible lieutenant governor, took office as governor in 1991 after his predecessor died unexpectedly. Those on the left who thought he might be a strident environmentalist would soon be sorely disappointed; and those on the right who feared he might be anti-business were pleasantly surprised.

If there was a theme that ran throughout Dean's tenure it was his zealous drive to keep Vermont's economy sustainable. With the nation in recession, Dean faced a budget deficit of about $65 million, which doesn't sound like much in California, where a $38 billion deficit loomed last year; but in Vermont-which in 2001 had a population of just 613,000 and where the state's general fund is less than that of the San Diego Unified School District-it was a big deal.

Dean put a draconian cap on spending and retired the state's deficit in no time at all, and he continued to be miserly until he left office at the end of 2002. In fact, he kept spending to a rate far below what was necessary to keep the state on strong economic footing. According to A Citizen's Guide to the Man Who Would Be President, Dean deviated from his stingy ways only when it came to providing health coverage for the uninsured and funding land-conservation projects.

Dean expanded the state's health program, which offered coverage to children and pregnant women, to cover some working people who didn't qualify for Medicaid. And he worked hard on reforming the entire state healthcare system so that every citizen was assured coverage, but the effort eventually fell apart, much like it did on a national scale during the Clinton administration. Some criticized Dean for admitting defeat too soon and giving up on it too easily.

Nevertheless, in Freyne's opinion, the Dean who campaigns as a presidential candidate for healthcare coverage for all Americans is the genuine article.

As a conservationist, Dean seems driven by his personal interests as a recreation enthusiast. He hiked, so he funded hiking trails. He biked, so he funded bike paths. And so on. During his tenure, he bought more than 470,000 acres to protect them from future development. But, as Hamilton E. Davis, wrote in the Dean book, “a clear fault line runs down the center of Howard Dean's stewardship of Vermont's environment.”

Davis reports that Dean limited his conservation projects to those that had little impact on the state's economy-state finances, again, being the litmus test for just about anything that crossed his desk.

Dean became known for siding with business when it came to environmental regulation. He approved projects that promised to worsen the water quality in the already polluted Lake Champlain, and he took action that led to the gutting of Act 250, the landmark law that formed the backbone of environmental regulation in Vermont. He simply chose jobs and the economy over anything else, because, argued Davis, that's what Dean considered most important for the future of Vermont.

Still, Davis wrote, “while many environmentalists agree that Dean's performance on protection is flawed, they are ambivalent about him now that he is running for president. Their problems with Dean are as nothing compared with their seething dislike for President Bush.”

One of the reasons Dean is seen as a rabid liberal, other than his critique of the Iraq invasion, is that he signed a civil-unions bill that gave gay couples the same rights and benefits as married heterosexuals. What many people don't know is that Dean wanted no part of it. The Vermont Supreme Court, ruling on a lawsuit filed by three same-sex couples trying to get the state to sanction gay marriage, forced Dean and the Legislature to act.

In December 1999, the court ruled that under the state constitution, Vermont was obliged to treat gay couples the same as straight couples, so the Legislature had a choice: change the marriage law to include gays, or create a separate but equal institution. The ruling compelled Dean, as the state's leader, to choose one or the other. He chose door No. 2.

In response to a question posed by Freyne back in 1999, Dean admitted to being “uncomfortable” with the concept of gay marriage, and when it came time to sign the civil-unions bill, he did so behind closed doors, without pomp or circumstance.

In a Jan. 12 story in the New Yorker, writer Mark Singer reported that Dean didn't not initially view civil unions as a civil-rights issue, but that in the months following the court ruling, he heard many tales of discrimination from gay people and his thinking on the issue evolved, perhaps resulting in his passionate campaign speeches about civil rights for gays.

He certainly embraced the issue in a comment during last Thursday's debate in New Hampshire about speaking out for what is right, not for what is popular: “I did it when I stood up for civil unions for gay and lesbian people in my home state when it wasn't popular, and I'm willing to do it again as president.”

This issue of CityBeat was going to press as voters in New Hampshire were finishing up at the polls, so it was unknown as of this writing how badly Dean's campaign was wounded in Iowa, but the timing of the media's assault on him was not ideal.

“The political junkies among us-we know, we've been following it, we're read the books, we've watched all the candidates,” said Kennedy, the political scientist, “but a lot of people are just waking up to this, so the timing of these attacks on Howard Dean is particularly damaging to his candidacy, and he's definitely on the spot now. He's gonna have to step up, respond to these accusations, try to communicate with both his supporters and his detractors and overcome some of this negative press.”

Kennedy said Dean should watch The War Room, the documentary film that illustrated how Bill Clinton battled attacks early in his 1992 bid for the White House. She noted that Democratic consultant James Carville's “rapid-response team” countered opponent strikes or media hits within 12 hours.

Judging from events in the week since The Speech, Dean may no be using Jerry Brown as a campaign consultant; Dean has dulled his fiery rhetoric. And, responding to criticism that his wife hasn't been at his side, he has enlisted her help.

In his Jan. 21 column in the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne said that before the Iowa caucuses, what Dean “did not count on is that Democratic presidential candidates are a teachable species. They made adjustments. So did the voters.” Dionne said Dean needed to make a few adjustments of his own.

In the Jan. 22 debate, Dean was contrite, almost ashamed, in responding to the hubbub over the speech and his off-the-cuff style. “My words are not always precise,” he said, “but my meaning is very, very clear” and “I'm not a perfect person.” Later that night, he appeared on the David Letterman show, reading the daily top-10 list: “Top 10 Ways I, Howard Dean, Can Turn Things Around.” No. 1 was “Oh, I don't know-maybe fewer crazy, red-faced rants.”

Dean cried uncle, acknowledging that the press had gotten the best of him.

In her piece last Sunday, columnist Maureen Dowd said that at a campaign appearance on Friday, Dean “looked a bit sheepish and hangdog at his drop from larger-than-life to smaller-than-life. He seemed lost without his manic Jack Nicholson eyebrow-arching anger and devilish smile, an Oreo cookie without the filling, not sure how to proceed in a race where suddenly everyone was acting so nice, so measured, so blah.”

But he has showed no sign of relenting in his precise strikes against George W. Bush. In the Jan. 22 debate, Dean assailed the President's tax cut for what it is-foolhardy long-term economic policy-while noting his own impressive record of balancing budgets. Dean blasted Bush's education reform, the largely unfunded No Child Left Behind Act, and touted his own record of expanding healthcare coverage in Vermont.

Recalling, perhaps, his line about being from the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” Dean stressed the basics: “This isn't about gay marriage; this is about jobs. This isn't about race; this is about education, because everybody needs a good education, no matter what color you are. This is not about the things that divide us. If we're ever going to win another election again in some of these states, we have to talk about education, healthcare and jobs. We cannot fight the Republicans on their ground-we've gotta fight them on our ground.”

Kennedy learned from some of her grad students who were in Iowa that the Dean campaign's inexperience showed. “When [the Dean people] showed up at the caucuses, they were outmaneuvered by the Kerry and Edwards people who knew how to run caucuses,” she said.

But most importantly, Kennedy said, as the frontrunner, Dean sustained attacks from the media and his opponents that he's unelectable.

“The question is, can he overcome that notion that he's unelectable?” she said. “He's got to stand up decisively and get his message out. If he lets the press define him, if he lets his opponents define him, he's gonna be doomed.”

It's ironic, Kennedy added, that the electability thing is what's hampering Dean. “I'm not convinced that the Republicans who rub their hands gleefully together and say, ‘Bring on Dean'-I'm not sure they're being 100 percent truthful,” she said. “I think Dean could potentially be a very devastating candidate if he ends up running against Bush. He is not a radical, by any stretch of the imagination. He's a social liberal, he's a fiscal conservative, and look where that got Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Also ironic is that the Howard Dean Vermonters knew was not fiery and red-faced-he was mostly low-key and he stuck to the basics. Judging from what's been written about his political past, he probably never once yelped, “Yeeeeaahh!” The passionate Dean that's being misunderstood as angry was a product created by the Dean campaign, and therein lies a fascinating distinction.

If history determined the future, Dean, the man, would likely make an effective manager of the country, sticking to basics like education and healthcare while eschewing costly political goodies like trillion-dollar tax cuts and foreign invasions. He would go about his presidential business the way he went about being a governor-very much like a doctor-determining the diagnosis and deciding, without much influence from others, what the treatment will be. He'd say what he felt like saying-to the utter frustration of his staff-because that's what he's always done.

But Dean, the campaign, is something else. It's a movement that found an agreeable human host. It's hundreds of thousands of regular people willing to chip in $25 or $50 or $100, meet each other in cafés across the country, write letters to strangers in Iowa and New Hampshire and take 14-hour bus rides from Los Angeles to Albuquerque because they're fed up with Politics American Style and, despite it all, are still optimistic enough to think they can change it.

Charlie Imes, the San Diego Dean campaign leader, was among those bussed to New Mexico Jan. 16 to walk precincts in advance of that state's Feb. 3 primary. He also drove to Arizona last weekend, another Feb. 3 primary state. And on Tuesday, there he was at McGregor's again, watching the New Hampshire primary coverage with some of his fellow supporters.

The press' shallow handling of the Dean “sideshow” last week is disappointing,” Imes said, particularly when there were so many elements of the President's State of the Union speech that deserved closer scrutiny

Nonetheless, “we're seeing the campaign come back strong,” he said. “I believe strongly in Howard Dean and his message, and have faith in the American public to see past what the press and the pundits have been telling them that they're supposed to think.”

Imes said that the hardship Dean faced last week strengthened the resolve of most of the candidate's San Diego team, but they did lose a few volunteers over it. “That's OK,” Imes said, “there will always be people who follow a candidate more for the cosmetic reasons, such as the fact that he was a front runner, and they may have thought they could get involved in the campaign and ride along for the fun.