Howard Dean
Howard Dean’s fatal system error
The Democratic candidate generated waves of money and enthusiasm via the Net, but his dot-com boom went bust in Iowa.
If Howard Dean were an Internet company, would he be the smash success of eBay, or the now-defunct Pets.com? The momentum Dean established over the summer and fall bore a striking resemblance to the straight-up curve of the dot-com boom. But, post-Iowa, that curve is pointing in a different direction, and now the question is, as was the case with so many of those dot-coms, was there every really a good product beneath the hype? Or is Dean really just buzz, nothing more than a pet food-selling sock puppet who, buoyed by his campaign’s Internet savvy, momentarily came to seem like a really good idea?
Now that Dean has lost a little bit of his luster, it may be the fate of his campaign to suffer endless comparisons to the dot-com crash. Live by the Internet, die by the Internet. Before he became a hit, Dean’s Internet strategy — composed of blogs, Meetups, e-mail groups and countless other Web-based doodads — was dismissed by his rivals as nothing more than gadget obsession. Then, in the summer, when the Web began paying off for Dean, pundits hailed his digital sophistication, and his rivals leaped into the chaotic blogosphere. Now, conventional wisdom regarding the Internet’s power in politics may be poised to shift again. After Dean’s poor showing in Iowa, how can anyone still argue — as some of Dean’s supporters were maintaining just a few weeks ago– that the Internet has fundamentally altered the playing field of presidential politics?
On Tuesday morning, reeling after Iowa, some of Dean’s fans were asking similar questions. On Dean’s blog, supporters wondered whether, in their passion for the former governor, they may have missed signs of danger on the ground. “All those worries about whether you were preaching to the choir on the blog — yeah, those were spot-on,” said one supporter, identified only as Natalie. “We got really excited about the movement and forgot about the candidacy. It’s all well and good to cheer each other on, but clearly that’s not enough. If ‘the movement’ doesn’t translate into votes, it’s a tempest in a teapot. In Iowa, this campaign was clearly not a revolutionary change in politics so much as a 600,000-strong exercise in navel-gazing. So let’s talk about what we’re going to do about it.”
Others said that Dean’s online community — which can be thick with insider jargon — had the air of a cult, turning off outsiders. “The heavy duty over-the-top cheerleading of ‘us’ drove a lot of people away,’ wrote Darwin Overson, a 37-year-old Dean supporter in Salt Lake City. “People are looking at over-the-top supporters and saying, I don’t want to be one of them. It reflects on Dean poorly … We should no longer be Deanies, Deany Babies or Deaniacs. We are Dean supporters.”
Certainly, Dean’s loss in Iowa deflates, at least temporarily, the Web-conquers-politics bubble. As recently as this weekend, when the polls were already showing that they’d have a hard time in Iowa, Dean’s people were boasting that their tech-centric campaign would translate into a huge win in Iowa.
Dean’s critics “think that the Dean campaign is simply a cybercampaign,” Tim Connolly, Dean’s Iowa field director, confidently told Slate. “They don’t realize that each of those people also lives in the analog world.”
Today, those comments smack of late-1990s hubris. Not only did Dean lose by a huge margin in Iowa, but he lost in all of the demographics that his campaign had previously said he would sweep. According to the entrance polls, young people preferred John Kerry over Dean. First-time caucusers — people Dean’s campaign had been holding up as a kind of secret weapon — chose Kerry and Edwards. And even the people who said they used the Internet for learning about the election chose Kerry.
What happened? Did the Internet fizzle on Howard Dean? “I think Dean happened to Howard Dean,” says Michael Cornfield, the research director of George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. The problem, as with those high-flying dot-coms, was the product. “Howard Dean did it to himself.”
Cornfield doesn’t believe that Dean’s loss in Iowa makes a case, either way, for the success or failure of the Internet’s role in politics. “The big irony from my perspective from following online politics is that a lot of politicians have been loath to get on the Web because they don’t like losing control,” Cornfield says. “But the 600,000 people in the Dean community stuck with him. I don’t think it’s the case that his Web-built organization failed him.” Instead, Dean wobbled, Cornfield says — “He’s been rude, he didn’t look presidential, and all of those television-era character judgments that we make still applied here.”
Cornfield concedes that perhaps all of Dean’s online adulation fed into that behavior. Virtually every time Dean has been criticized in the mainstream media and by his fellow candidates, his campaign has sent out urgent messages to his base — and the base has responded by opening its wallets. Could it be that “the success of raising funds by being anti-establishment blinded him to what was actually happening? That’s very plausible.” But then “someone in the inner circle is not combining his Internet feedback with his other feedback,” Cornfield says. “You would think somebody would show him a film clip of what he looks like and what he sounds like.”
Others echo that theme. “Did that amplification factor of the closed room make Dean more Dean-like?” asks Jeff Jarvis, a blogger who wondered on Monday night whether blogging hurt Howard Dean. “I answer that by saying no,” Jarvis says. “He’s still the candidate; he’s the one making the mistakes.” The problem, though, is that the bloggers supporting Dean weren’t able to change Dean’s tone, Jarvis says. “You look at him last night” — at his much-criticized concession speech — “and he was wacky there. There was nothing to pull him back down. And if you looked at his blog, it was the same thing.”
Can the Internet heat up Dean’s candidacy now, just as it did in the summer? That doesn’t seem very likely, especially as Dean’s appeal online seems to have slowed. Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, once predicted that more than 900,000 people would have been signed up for Dean by the end of 2003 — but the number is now hovering just under 600,000, and Dean’s online supporters are expressing concern that it’s not growing.
It’s possible that after his loss in Iowa, the Internet will abandon Howard Dean, Michael Cornfield says. On Monday night, the campaign put out another appeal for money, and it will be a bad sign for Dean if the money doesn’t pour in. Even before next week’s New Hampshire race, “We’ll be able to see whether he’s recovering or not,” Cornfield says. “And we’ll also see if any of the other candidates who’ve paid him the tribute of imitating his Internet campaign will have any activity. They all have their blogs and their Meetups, too.”
On Dean’s blog on Tuesday, supporters didn’t seem to be leaving Dean — but many were clearly disappointed, and they offered many ideas for the candidate. The most popular one seemed to be “Be positive!” as one poster wrote repeatedly. Howard Dean should lose the anger and start talking about his record, many advised.
“We all learned lessons in Iowa,” says Jeff Jarvis. “Howard Dean learned the biggest one — stop being an asshole. We learned about the insular nature of this medium — we learned not to blow up the bubble, not to put too much emphasis on what this thing can do. It can do miraculous, wonderful things, but it can’t win an election. It can change the world, but it can’t win an election. What we learned in Iowa was not that blogs didn’t help Dean but that they didn’t help him in the way he needed.”
Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer and the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. More Farhad Manjoo.
Howard Dean responds to Salon
And we respond to his spokeswoman's dismissal of our story about Dean's paid advocacy work
Howard Dean Howard Dean’s spokeswoman, Karen Finney, has responded to my story on Dean’s turn into paid advocacy work, accusing me of engaging in “lazy journalism.” I think the adjective is not accurate.
Salon has nothing personal against Dean. But we felt that a liberal champion’s reliance on paid advocacy work reveals something significant about our political culture, and possibly about Dean himself. Finney’s statement is presented here in its entirety, along with my responses.
Continue Reading CloseJustin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. You can follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott.
The seduction of Howard Dean
The liberal firebrand succumbs to Washington's money culture
Howard Dean Howard Dean has long cultivated an image as the plainspoken doctor who speaks for the left wing of the Democratic Party, a role he still plays as a pugnacious pundit on TV. But since his term as chairman of the Democratic National Committee ended in January 2009, Dr. Dean has taken on a less-noticed role: paid advocate for interest groups that would find few fans among the progressive voters once energized by Dean’s 2004 presidential bid.
Dean may not be the worst of the “buckrakers,” those prototypical capital characters who exploit their name and connections without regard for principle. But his recent political forays seem to have diverged from his trailblazing left-liberal past.
Continue Reading CloseJustin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. You can follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott.
Today’s most inane 2012 speculation
Politico's Roger Simon imagines Howard Dean challenging the president
Governor Howard Dean, physician and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, speaks during the "American Technophile: "How Technology is changing Politics, Governance & Healthcare" panel at the Fortune Tech Brainstorm 2009 in Pasadena, California July 22, 2009. REUTERS/Phil McCarten (UNITED STATES BUSINESS)(Credit: © Phil Mccarten / Reuters) Will Howard Dean challenge Barack Obama in 2012? Politico columnist Roger Simon, who drew Dean from a hat full of cards that he’d written the names of various Democrats on, says probably!
First, Simon lays out the history: Reagan and Clinton were only reelected because they did not face serious primary challenges. But Jesse Jackson almost ran against Clinton, and he would’ve made Clinton lose, because of Whitewater, NAFTA and Troopergate. Thankfully, Rahm Emanuel and Harold Ickes made Jackson not run, thus saving Clinton from being Jimmy Carter.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
Harry Reid and Howard Dean: Fox News enablers
This is what happens when Democrats cave in to right-wing fear campaigns
Governor Howard Dean, physician and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, speaks during the "American Technophile: "How Technology is changing Politics, Governance & Healthcare" panel at the Fortune Tech Brainstorm 2009 in Pasadena, California July 22, 2009. REUTERS/Phil McCarten (UNITED STATES BUSINESS)(Credit: © Phil Mccarten / Reuters) Harry Reid and Howard Dean had their reasons for coming out against the Park51 project in lower Manhattan last week. Well, at least Reid, who is locked in a tight reelection campaign in Nevada, did. Dean’s motives are a little harder to discern.
But whatever they hoped to accomplish, one thing is indisputable: Reid and Dean both did an enormous favor to the right-wing fear-mongers who have been pushing the “ground zero mosque” hysteria, equipping them with a compelling talking point for the cable news circuit. Here’s a sampling of how Reid and Dean have been invoked in the past few days, often (but not always) on Fox News:
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Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki.
Heroes, villains and cowards of the so-called “ground zero mosque”
Who's defended religious liberty, who's been too scared to, and who truly hates our founding principles?
Top left, clockwise: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Harry Reid, President Obama The bizarre, ginned-up controversy surrounding the Park51 project — a proposed Islamic community center, like the 92nd Street Y, including a space for worship, to be built at the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory (which is a store, not a factory) on Park Place in lower Manhattan, near, but not in sight of, the site of the World Trade Center — has exposed not just the blatant Islamophobia (and cheerful willingness to exploit bigotry) of many luminaries of the right, but also the cowardice of many supposed liberals. Just so we know where we stand, and using, as criteria for placement, my own inexact impressions of their public statements, I present the official War Room lists of “ground zero mosque” heroes, villains and cowards.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
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