Over the last week or two, I’ve seen several Dean campaign staffers, and Dean himself, insist that the political landscape shifted dramatically after Al Gore extended his support to Dean. In fact, they argue, it led to such desperation that the Dem establishment pulled out all the stops to derail Dean’s campaign.
I can agree that the Gore endorsement struck fear in the hearts of the Dem field, but the Dean camp’s conclusions about the immediate aftermath seem entirely misplaced.
The New York Times, for example, asked Joe Trippi to identify the reason for Dean’s “collapse.” He said:
You have a party that’s tried to make every rule that it can to stop an insurgent. But at the same time — it’s not Al Gore’s endorsement — what I’m saying is, him endorsing us was a good thing. But at the same time, the unintended consequence of it was that the second Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean, alarms went off in newsrooms and at every other campaign headquarters. At the campaign headquarters, they all had meetings and said, ”We’ve got to stop Howard Dean right this second.” That’s what the Al Gore endorsement meant. It meant, We’ve got to kill this guy or he’s going to be the nominee.
Dean offered a similar assessment on Larry King earlier this month.
I actually do think the endorsement of Al Gore began the decline, not for the reason that you said, because the establishment in Washington really realized that I might be the nominee and they did not like that. The media folks didn’t like it, the other folks in the race didn’t like it, and they did everything they could to make sure we weren’t [successful].
This may make the Dean campaign feel better, but I don’t think the facts buttress their argument.
Gore endorsed Dean on Dec. 9, about a month before Iowans started voting. To be sure, most observers, including me, saw this as a major development that would benefit Dean tremendously. Many pundits said the endorsement was effectively the beginning of the end of the nomination fight.
Dean and Trippi are right that Gore’s official support solidified Dean’s position as the Dem frontrunner and scared the hell out of his rivals. But to hear them tell it, the development led to such widespread panic among the Dem establishment and the amorphous “media” that the other candidates lashed out in desperation. Trippi even sounds vaguely conspiratorial about it, suggesting “they” had “meetings” to strategize on how best to “stop Howard Dean right this second.”
If true, the combined efforts of the Dem establishment and the Dean-hating media were incredibly haphazard, unorganized, and invisible.
It seems to me the exact opposite occurred. After Gore endorsed Dean, many establishment types jumped on the bandwagon, not off. In the immediate weeks following the announcement, Dean picked up more endorsements from “Washington Democrats” than ever before.
In just three weeks after Dec. 9, a slew of high profile Dems, including Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Xavier Bacerra (D-Calif.), Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, Rush Holt (D-N.J.), West Virginia’s House delegation, New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Bob Menendez all followed Gore’s example and threw their support behind Dean. By the time of the Iowa caucuses, Dean had more endorsements from sitting members of Congress than any of his rivals, including Dick Gephardt, the so-called establishment candidate who led the House Dems for nearly a decade.
The Dem establishment wasn’t rallying to tear Dean down; they appeared to be rallying to boost him up. To look back at December and insist that Dem insiders were working quietly to destroy Dean’s prospects fails to appreciate all evidence to the contrary.
Indeed, Dean and Trippi are arguing that the establishment went into overdrive immediately after the Gore endorsement, but they’re surprisingly short on details. Were there any new attack ads launched by Dean’s rivals? A new scandal cooked up in some backroom? Political reporters threw a couple of meaningless controversies Dean’s way (remember that nonsense about the state trooper?), but nothing of any substance and certainly nothing that struck a chord with voters.
Even in the debates after the Gore endorsement, there weren’t any specific or pointed attacks launched against Dean. If the rest of the field were really in a panic and, as Trippi put it, Dean’s rivals decided it was time to “kill” him, they had a bizarre way of showing it.
I’m afraid Dean and Trippi are just rationalizing. Dean lost because voters in Iowa and New Hampshire grew tired of him and decided to back someone else. This wasn’t an establishment smear or a coup from insiders in “Georgetown salons.” It was a candidate whose support was a mile wide and an inch thin.