In the running

Howard Dean is scarcely five minutes into his standard campaign speech to a crowd of Democrats on a New Hampshire lawn, when it becomes apparent why he is at the centre of so much unexpected excitement.

Dean, who until recently was governor of the neighbouring state of Vermont, does not exactly look the part of an electoral phenomenon. He is neither tall nor imposing (a fact only emphasised by the fact his handlers stand him on little stools to make his speeches).

Nor can he boast a military record that has become so politically handy in this age of perpetual conflict. In fact, in his dour brown suit, he looks every inch the provincial doctor he was before he wandered into Vermont politics.

But it is soon clear that Dean is visibly, viscerally angry and it just so happens that right now, anger is what the true party faithful are looking for in their presidential candidate in the 2004 elections.

The Democratic rank and file are furious that the country was taken to war on false pretences, and they are outraged at the Bush tax cuts, which are in effect a transfer of staggering proportions from the nation’s savings account to the nation’s millionaires.

Dean has opted to give vent to that fury, in marked contrast to most of his rivals from the Democratic establishment in Congress, who voted to support the war and struck a deal with the White House over the tax cuts.

He has consequently emerged as the surprise front-runner in the Democratic nomination race, upsetting the conventional wisdom that an anti-war, pro-gay (he instituted civil unions for same-sex couples in Vermont) liberal could never thrive in a nation so fearful and so intoxicated with patriotism.

Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont politics professor who has watched Dean’s meteoric rise, says: ‘The Democrats chose to leave that corner of the political spectrum open, and Dean has solid political instincts. He saw the gap.”

In the past few days Dean has abruptly leaped from relative obscurity to the poll position in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, raising more money than all his rivals over the past quarter, $7,5-million.

That may be small change compared to President George W Bush’s bulging war chest, but for a lowly Democrat in this fund-raising phase of the contest, the ‘money primary”, it is a triumph that gives Dean that all-important quality — momentum.

His outspoken style and his high-risk politics have put him at the head of an insurgency. He is promising the defeat-weary Democrats what John McCain promised the Republicans in 2000 — the tantalising prospect of a new brand of politics that will revitalise the United States democracy.

‘People always say Dean’s so liberal he can’t win,” the governor tells a crowd gathered on a warm evening in the small New Hampshire town of Hopkinton. ‘But the blueprint can’t be ‘let’s try to be like George Bush’. The blueprint must be to reach out to people who have given up on the political process. Stop being afraid of right-wing talkshow hosts. Stop trying to plant our flag further and further to the right. Plant our flag in the middle of where America is and give people a reason to vote again.”

Hopkinton is an unlikely setting for a rebellion. It is a genteel settlement of wooden, colonial-era homes and austere churches. All but a couple of the 250 faces looking up at Dean are white and mostly middle-aged — not exactly an excluded underclass.

But that is the nature of politics in New Hampshire, a peaceful prosperous state with the jarringly inappropriate motto ‘Live free or die”. Through historical accident, the place has become a crucial early hoop the candidates have to jump through and survive if they are to get a shot at the presidency.

Consequently, contenders for the most powerful job in the history of the world have to spend weeks courting the state house by house, schmoozing voters in their own back gardens.

It is an odd arrangement, but it has been locked in political tradition since John Kennedy launched his candidacy only a few kilometres from Hopkinton in 1960 — a parallel the Dean campaign team are happy to draw.

Dean’s new visibility has put him at, or near, the top of the Democratic Party polls both in New Hampshire and the only contest that precedes it, Iowa. He is chewing the heels of the party’s two venerable congressional leaders, Dick Gephardt and John Kerry. And Dean is now able to start building a nationwide campaign.

‘We’re speeding up our decisions that we had thought we couldn’t make until October. We’re putting staff in the south and in Oklahoma,” Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager boasted from the campaign’s Vermont headquarters.

In almost any other industrialised country, Dean’s campaign platform would sound boringly middle-of-the-road. In Bush’s US, it verges towards the liberal extreme.

He thinks the US should not have invaded Iraq and he wants a public inquiry into the propaganda campaign that preceded the war, and believes the burden of running the country should now be shared with Nato and the United Nations.

At home, he is calling for the Bush tax cuts to be reversed and for the money to be spent on health care, education and paying off the national debt. He is arguing for a government-run health insurance scheme available to all Americans — a radical proposal in a country with 42-million people uninsured.

‘Surely the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth can join the British, the French, the Germans and the Japanese, who all have health insurance for their citizens?” Dean asks the crowd, defying prevailing political correctness by unfavourably comparing the US with Europe. Such unpatriotic ideas will make him an easy target for the US’s right-wing talkshow hosts, who have a stranglehold on political thought in the heartland, but Dean has built his electoral persona in defiance of their dominance.

His campaign strategy has been to bypass the mainstream media and to gather momentum instead on the Internet. McCain and liberal Democrat Bill Bradley both used their websites as successful campaign tools in 2000.

Dean’s supporters, however, have gone one step further. They are organising the campaign online through a commercial site, Meetup.com, normally frequented by Harry Potter and Star Trek fans. The Dean campaign paid the company a fee of $2 500 to use its website as a billboard.

It allows supporters in towns across the US to find each other, set up a group, and organise a place and time to meet. Earlier this month, for example, 55 000 of them met at exactly the same time at a total of 310 halls and bars, to pledge money and to write personal letters to undecided voters (in Iowa on this occasion).

The system has not only helped generate the flood of campaign contributions, it has also fostered a spirit of solidarity among campaign volunteers at minimum cost.

‘We’re now getting responses from Iowa, where people are saying they can’t remember the last time they received a handwritten letter from anyone,” Trippi says.

From an original staff of seven in January this year, the campaign now has 180 000 volunteers and has set a goal of one million by the end of the year. Aaron Lavallee, a 23-year-old accountant, came to the Dean campaign through Meetup.com’s website. ‘At first I thought it was a dating service, but then I saw the link to Dean, and I thought he doesn’t seem like an inside politician from Washington,” Lavallee says. ‘I went along to the meeting to see if I was the lone ranger in my area, but there were about 40 people there.”

‘He has tapped into the anti-war movement,” said Michael Cornfield, a professor at George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. ‘He’s also tapped the American penchant for underdogs, for picking someone from nowhere. He’s this year’s Jimmy Carter or Gary Hart. He’s a maverick and a risk-taker and Americans love that.”

Cornfield, and most US political analysts, believe Dean has a reasonable chance of winning the Democratic nomination. But winning the presidency outright would be quite another matter. All the risks he takes in the primaries would come back to haunt him in the freestyle combat of the general election.

He has no military or national security record and floundered when faced with questions about the armed forces in a recent TV interview.

While Vermont governor, he changed his stance on the death penalty, from outright opposition to support in exceptional circumstances, such as the murder of a child. Faced with intense questioning on the issue, he looked ill at ease. He is no Bill Clinton. Garrison Nelson, who has seen him in action in Vermont, says he can crack under pressure.

‘The positive side of being a physician is that you believe you know better than your patient. The negative side is that you don’t take challenges very well. He bristles when challenged,” Nelson says.

When the real pressure comes, Dean may also discover the cost of burning his bridges with the Democratic Party leadership he has spent the primaries deriding. There may be few establishment figures ready to come to his defence, nor can he count on the party bastions — the unions and black community groups.

As governor, his fiscal conservatism alienated organised labour, and Vermont is hardly an ideal base from which to forge minority ties.

The Republicans claim to be thrilled Dean is doing so well. Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, has even been spotted at a Dean rally, shouting ironic encouragement. Dean’s rivals in the Democratic camp, meanwhile, warn of an electoral catastrophe reminiscent of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

Then again, the Democrats have not done very well playing it safe in Bush’s shadow. It is a moment of decision for the party and its supporters. The only certainty is that if they choose the Howard Dean route, it will at least be clear what the election is about. —