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The Dean Campaign, 2002-2004
Dean has dropped out of the race. Following his finishing a distant third in Wisconsin, he dropped out. My reaction? Not good riddance; that was my reaction when Gephardt and Lieberman resigned. Not “Oh, fuck!”; Dean has continually disappointed me since the last few days of 2003, when he made the “committed believer” statement. On my news page, I wrote:
Dean dropped out. I can't believe it. He actually fulfilled a promise... But then again, he promised he'd stay on - in other words, he flip-flopped twice within a span of two weeks (first it was first in Wisconsin or bust, then it was go on anyway, and now he dropped out).
On February the 5th, he said that losing Wisconsin “will put us out of the race.” By February the 15th, he had flip-flopped, saying that he’d go on no matter what. And now he has flip-flopped again, withdrawing after making a promise that he’d go on, which itself violated an earlier promise to withdraw.
A lot of people, I know, have written or are going to write post-mortems about Dean’s campaign, specifically about his grassroots movement, the “People-powered Howard” theme, and so on. For instance, I recall fellow OSPer Jay Bullock saying something to that effect, namely that he’d write something about the grassroots movement. Obviously, his opinion is going to be very different from mine; he, after all, was part of that grassroots movement, whereas I have a disdain for mass movements.
Many have commented on how Dean’s grassroots message is going to change politics forever, and how it is bringing people back into politics. I beg to differ on two counts: one, the grassroots campaign is not necessarily a good thing, and two, Dean’s campaign was not as grassroots as it was and still is painted.
My opposition to the grassroots campaign is not just personal – true, I have a certain aversion to mass movements since they turn people into bricks in a wall, and I hate to be just another brick in a wall – but involves several reasons, of ideology as well as of pragmatics.
The ideological reason has to do with the fact that a grassroots campaign is very sheepish: the involved citizen contributes money in donations and time in campaign work, supporters sometimes take the initiative, and generally the campaign depends on the continuation of this grassroots support more than “traditional,” non-grassroots campaigns. However, it is important to notice that the people do not “control” the campaign at all any more than sergeants control strategy in wars; generals control wars, and similarly only the people at the top are really allowed to think for themselves – Jay worked for Dean, but he didn’t write his platform points, or to my knowledge even participate in them in some way (as he would have if Dean had started a debate in one of Blog for America’s comment threads about whether Dean should take position A, B, C, or whatever on issue X). This way or another, however, grassroots campaigns mean that the individual supporter simply does not matter.
The pragmatic argument against a grassroots movement is that it encourages opportunism. On the face of it, it seems as if the situation is in fact the other way around, meaning that in a grassroots campaign the candidate will face mass desertion if he starts flip-flopping. However, evidence teaches that mass movements are no protection from flip-flops: witness how Reagan and Clinton, both of whom had mass but not necessarily grassroots support, could flip-flop with their supporters continuing to vote for them, even after Reagan failed to balance the budget and pay anything more than lip service to Christian fundamentalists, and even after Clinton all but ignored environmental issues and instituted welfare reform. With Dean it was the same, even though granted, he never flip-flopped on the issues that he emphasized the most, namely health care, a balanced budget, pragmatism, and education, roughly in this order.
Still, the grassroots campaign encouraged Dean to be, in politically correct language, ideologically flexible; in politically incorrect language, it encouraged him to contradict earlier statements whenever he could get away with it. Besides, grassroots campaigns violate a balance between the delegate model of representation (by which the politician does as his or her constituents say) and the trustee model (by which the politician is bound only by his or her own conscience and by the fact that there is an election every few years), skewing it too much toward the delegate model, and worse, making the leader be the delegate not so much of the people at large as of the supporters who fuel the campaign.
I would also like to challenge the notion that Dean’s campaign was as bottom-up as it was considered. My subjective impression of Blog for America is of something like an Order of the Day, a successful attempt at making Dean appear more of a populist than he really is. I am not talking about Dean’s upper class background or corporate contributions; I am completely indifferent to the former and hardly care about the latter – rather, I am talking about the “You have the power” and “Dean is the messenger; we are the message” themes. The former theme is in fact truthful, but only because Dean wanted; he could just as well have chosen the conventional way of campaigning and barely if at all suffered in the polls. The latter is completely false – Dean’s supporters are not the messenger, because after all they don’t write his platform, or decide how to campaign, or would have had any chance of getting meaningful jobs in a Dean administration. Jay’s blog gives the best possible anecdotal evidence of this: the Dean campaign sent an email on February 4th to all supporters, which included the following line: Help Dean win delegates in Wisconsin and Virginia by sending handwritten postcards to the undecided voters included in your meetup package – thus, the supporter is reduced to handwriting postcards, making phone bank calls, and getting out the vote.
That is not to say that bringing people back into politics is a bad thing. I am fairly certain that Dean increased voter turnout in the primary, and would increase turnout in the general election if only he was nominated (given his withdrawal, I allow myself to use the conditional here). If he indeed invigorates young people the way Kerry just doesn’t, then on hindsight his candidacy will have turned out to be have a positive influence on politics, with or without a consistent message. And the Dean of early 2003, the one who didn’t contradict himself and who was not afraid to blast the Democrats for being too conservative (as opposed to the Dean who defended Gray Davis and reinvented himself whenever it was politically expedient), will for some time be the standard to which I compare candidates – and that includes the other Dean, the Dean of early 2004.
And then there were four, of which two have a probability of one in millions to win (Kucinich and Sharpton), one has a low but existent probability (Edwards), and one is almost guaranteed a victory, barring a sudden slip just before Super Tuesday akin to Dean’s sudden fall during the three or four days leading to Iowa.
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