Howard Dean, as governor of Vermont, really was a moderate Dem. He governed from the center, was labeled a “Republican in disguise” by liberal critics, and irritated the state’s left wing so much, many of them broke away and formed a third party — Vermont’s Progressive Party — which now helps split the state’s left and elect Republicans to statewide office.
I’m reminded of this point, frequently, by supporters of Dean’s presidential campaign, who hope to use Dean’s record of moderation as proof of his electability in the general election. The caricature of the angry New England liberal, they say, is ridiculous. No one in Vermont recognizes Dean as the wild-eyed leftist the media makes him out to be. Once he gets the nomination, his supporters explain, Dean’s campaign will be able to refocus public attention on Dean’s centrist priorities and record.
It’s not a terrible argument, though it may be unrealistic. Dean’s reputation has been cemented at this point as a hero of the Democratic Party’s liberal base. The plan may be for him to reinvent himself as a moderate fiscal conservative in time to beat Bush, but Dean’s fans may not appreciate how difficult this would likely be.
And if this really is the Dean campaign’s strategy, they have a funny way of showing it. In fact, Dean appears to be going out of his way to burn the centrist bridge now — making his followers happy and renouncing the New Democrat label he appeared to embrace as governor.
At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Monday, Dean offered one of his quintessential mixed messages. “[E]ven the Democratic Leadership Council, which is sort of the Republican part of the Democratic Party … the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, we’re going to need them too, we really are,” Dean said.
Oddly enough, at the same town hall meeting, Dean also asked all Dems to rally behind him. “We’re not going to win as Democrats unless we’re all together, and that’s the truth,” he added.
Classic Dean. The message in a nutshell: I can beat Bush because I’m really a moderate, although I hate the centrist wing of the party because they’re really Republicans, although I’m sort of reaching out to them because I’ll need their help to beat Bush. Slapping a party faction with one hand, reaching out to the same faction with the other hand.
This comes less than a week after Dean gave a speech outlining his governing principles in which he sought to contrast his approach to that of Bill Clinton’s, once again trying to break free of the centrist model from which he once governed.
I can certainly understand frustration with the DLC; I have differences with the organization’s agenda myself. But love ’em or hate ’em, Dem leaders from the DLC have won the popular vote for three consecutive presidential elections — the first time the Dems have won three in a row since the 1940s.
Dean’s strategy of intentionally dividing the party with a Bush-like philosophy — you’re either with me, or you’re against me — strikes me as foolish and counterproductive.
Dean appears to be running as not only the anti-Bush, but also as the anti-Clinton. Some used to criticize Clinton for trying to be “all things to all people.” The comment was frequently intended as an insult, but I saw a political strength behind the message that was unique in modern Democratic politics.
Clinton managed, through his exceptional political skills, to rally all the elements of the party together, each seeing him as one of their own. Clinton was simultaneously popular with centrists and liberals, northerners and southerners, unions and business leaders, DC insiders and outsiders, secularists and the devout, all the while promising a “third” way.
Dean is turning Clinton’s strategy on its head, identifying the parts of the Dem party he disapproves of and condemning them publicly, labeling them not good enough for his new coalition. There are genuine fissures within the party right now, but instead of healing the internal wounds, Dean seems intent on exacerbating them.
Try as I might, I can’t figure out how this will succeed. As Ron Brownstein noted today, “[E]ven Democratic moderates who have been sympathetic to Dean’s campaign worry he could be pushing the party toward an internal upheaval that would severely erode his ability to compete as a general-election nominee.”
Dean has no closer ally among the centrist wing of the Dem party than Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a Democratic political action committee, who used to be a DLC staffer. And yet, with Dean’s recent condemnation of the DLC, even Rosenberg appears to be worried about Dean’s direction.
“Is [Dean] going to present a new synthesis that incorporates all the best of all the traditions in the party…or is he going to be the leader of the counterrevolution” Rosenberg said this week.
To be fair, the DLC picked a fight with Dean earlier this year, so this is an extension of Dean’s bitterness. In May, DLC leaders publicly expressed their concerns that Dean would take the party backwards and lose badly to Bush. The move drew a quick rebuke from all sides. The DLC, the critics argued, shouldn’t be dividing the party.
The DLC bit its tongue ever since, but Dean is still firing away — going after the Democratic Party in general, the DLC in specific, “Washington Democrats,” and the party “establishment.”
I guess Dean is left to believe that his impressive base of supporters will be big enough to carry him through to victory. As of this morning, nearly 545,000 people had signed up as members as “Americans for Dean.” That’s impressive, but it’s barely half of the campaign’s goal of 1 million people by the end of the calendar year. He’s built an army, but its exponential growth has come to a standstill.
If Dean intends on succeeding, he’ll need to appreciate that his legions of fans are great, but they’re not enough to win a national election. He’ll need to stop burning bridges and start building some. It’s a big party with large constituencies of people who don’t believe exactly as he does. The sooner he stops attacking these factions as would-be Republicans, the better it will be for his campaign — and the party that I want to see held together.
Slate’s William Saletan, who appeared to be enthusiastically pro-Dean in recent months, had an item this week in which he concluded that Dean’s attacks against the party’s center are terribly misguided. Though I disliked Saletan’s terrorist metaphor, the point was valid.
“Either all this stuff from the Dean campaign about the establishment is an attack on the Clintonian center, or it’s the usual meaningless blather that politicians toss to crowds to make themselves look nonpolitical,” Saletan said. “Either way, it’s fake. I think it’s blather, but the more Dean talks about it and applies it to various issues, the more it looks like an attack on the center. And if that’s the mission Dean has in mind, Democrats would be well-advised to jump off his truck before he blows it up.”