Where Dean's record on farm and food policy issues is, at best, mixed, Kucinich is the chief sponsor of Congressional legislation to label genetically modified foods, and he was an ally of Wellstone in struggles to break up the agribusiness conglomerates. While Dean has a history of supporting open-ended free-trade agreements, Kucinich has worked as hard--sometimes harder--than Gephardt to defeat them. In this campaign, it is Kucinich more than any other contender who has forced issues of militarism and globalization into the debate, with plans for slashing the Pentagon budget and ending US participation in NAFTA.

Even on the social issues where conservative commentators portray Dean as the embodiment of liberalism, it is Kucinich who goes for the bold. While Dean gets credit for signing Vermont's "civil union" law for gays and lesbians, it is Kucinich who supports gay marriage. While Dean has a much longer and better record of support for abortion rights, Kucinich is the candidate who promises to appoint only prochoice jurists to the federal bench. Dean supports the death penalty in some cases; Kucinich is an abolitionist. Dean has in the past embraced proposals to raise the retirement age; Kucinich has fought with the fervor of an old New Dealer to expand Social Security protections. While Dean, a physician born to privilege in New York City, shies away from embracing single-payer healthcare reform, saying, "If you want to totally change the healthcare system, I'm not your guy," Kucinich, the working-class kid from Cleveland who has gone without healthcare coverage in his life, is a passionate advocate for a national program to guarantee healthcare coverage for all. At the end of August, Kucinich told cheering delegates at the United Electrical workers union convention in Pittsburgh, "Unless a Democratic candidate is willing to step forward and challenge this [healthcare] system, he has no business carrying the banner of this party."

Kucinich has found allies among progressives who know Dean. Ben Cohen, co-founder of the Vermont-based Ben & Jerry's ice cream concern and a prominent advocate for progressive causes, is an outspoken Kucinich backer. So is Vermont's poet laureate, Grace Paley, a leader of Feminists for Kucinich. Vermont's Independent Congressman, Bernie Sanders, while he is not making an endorsement in the Democratic race, praises Kucinich at town meetings. Qualms about Dean among progressives in his home state are a reflection of the fact that during more than a decade as Vermont's chief executive, he rarely governed from the left. Echoing Bill Clinton's moves at the federal level, Dean was a cheerleader for welfare reform who balanced budgets by making painful cuts in state programs. Dean brags on the campaign trail about signing his state's civil-union legislation but doesn't mention that he did so only after the state Supreme Court effectively ordered the change. And Dean's coziness with corporations and conservatives helped inspire formation of the Vermont Progressive Party, a coalition of labor, farm and social-justice activists that won almost 10 percent of the vote for activist Anthony Pollina's 2000 challenge to Dean.

In a 2002 interview, given as he launched his presidential campaign, Dean was asked about criticism from Vermonters. "The Progressives hate me because they're all big liberals and I'm not, and I've stopped them on many occasions," he declared. Dean continues to tell interviewers that he is no man of the left. "I don't mind being characterized as a 'liberal'--I just don't happen to think it's true," he said in February.

What Dean's opponents fail to understand, however, is that no candidate will overtake Dean merely by pointing out his inconsistencies. His supporters are not blind to their man's weaknesses; rather, they are awed by his strengths: a willingness to blister Bush, and a campaign that seems fluid and flexible on the surface but that is in fact exceptionally disciplined, with plenty of money and even more momentum. If Dean is to be displaced, it will be by a candidate who does a better job of convincing grassroots Democrats he or she will give Bush no quarter and, when the opportunity comes, deliver the knockout blow. Nicholas Johnson, a former FCC commissioner who now teaches at the University of Iowa, argues that Kucinich, not Dean, is best positioned to turn anger at Bush into a progressive populist force capable of attracting disaffected Democrats and Greens to the polls. And he maintains that there is still plenty of time for Kucinich to capitalize on the one-on-one politics of Iowa, where Kucinich backers say "a Dean supporter is a Democrat who hasn't heard Dennis speak."

But the force that slows Dean, if it exists, might well come from elsewhere. Bush's sliding approval ratings and the volatility of a primary contest where predictable front-runners have already been swept aside makes the race appealing to latecomers. Former Vice President Al Gore is delivering policy addresses, and New York Senator Hillary Clinton is reportedly re-examining her options. While odds are against either of them leaping into the race--absent a deadlocked Democratic convention--retired Gen. Wesley Clark could yet get in. The morning line on Clark is that his candidacy could doom Kerry, since the Massachusetts senator has made his status as a Vietnam veteran central to his electability argument. But Clark's appeal to grassroots Democrats has more to do with his critiques of Administration policy in Iraq and the sense that, as a former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, he might be the Democrat best positioned to knock the legs out from under Bush's "national security" appeals. That makes him a threat to Dean as well as to Kerry. Already, Clark is polling better than several of the announced candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire. When "Draft Clark" volunteers began to engage Dean backers at farmers' markets and county fairs in late August, they delivered a message that might yet frustrate Dean as much as he has frustrated the other contenders: "Sure," the Clark enthusiasts explain, "Dean sounds good on the issues, but Wesley Clark can win."

More than anything else, those two words--"can win"--set the standard for a Democratic base. Stung by the tepid campaigns mounted by their party in 2000 and 2002, activists started looking for a candidate who was ready to fight in 2004, and Howard Dean made himself that candidate. Critics keep trying to say he has peaked too soon, but so far he's gone from strength to strength. And that ability to keep coming out on top has given him a mystique that seems to matter more to a lot of Democrats than ideological consistency. At the late-August Communications Workers of America convention in Chicago, Dean drew the sort of thunderous applause usually reserved for endorsed candidates. "I know we disagree with Dean on some things, but you just get a sense that this guy has a plan to win the nomination and beat Bush," said a top CWA official. "And, when you get down to it, beating Bush is what this is all about."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.