Abstract

Dean's Rough Ride

The author discusses why the campaign of U.S. presidential candidate Howard Dean failed, and argues that Dean, despite having dropped out of the race, made important contributions to American politics. In forty years of observing presidential contests, I cannot remember another major candidate brutalized so intensely by the media, with the possible exception of George Wallace. Howard Dean contributed some fatal errors of his own, to be sure, but he also brought fresh air and new ideas, a crisp call to revitalize the Democratic Party and at least the outlines of deeper political and economic reforms. The reporters, as surrogate agents for Washington's insider sensibilities, blew him off. Dean's big mistake was in not recognizing, up front, that the media are very much part of the existing order and were bound to be hostile to his provocative kind of politics. The party establishment, limp as it is, was correct to target Dean with tribal vengeance. What the insiders loathed are the same qualities many of us found exhilarating. In his brisk, scattered manner, he was talking about power, inviting people to contemplate the deteriorated condition of our democracy, expressing his solidarity with their skepticism and alienation. He wanted to confront the concentration of oversized corporations and break up media conglomerates. The Dean campaign demonstrated, most dramatically, that people can make their own politics via the Internet and elsewhere by raising lots of money from outsiders, i.e., mere citizens.