Four Years Later, Howard Dean Is Proven Right

November 10, 2008

Mac Zilber

Not so long ago, the future of the Democratic party was centrist Al Gore, centrist Joe Lieberman, centrist John Edwards, centrist Hillary Clinton, centrist Evan Bayh, centrist Mark Warner, and others. The “third way” was the only way, and to be branded as a liberal was a quick way to lose an election. In 2004, Howard Dean, the formerly centrist governor of Vermont, decided to run a campaign for president where he would represent the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.” He relied on small donors from the internet to raise money, and wound up shattering the record for primary funds raised, getting contributions from over 250,000 different people, which, at the time, was unheard of. He became the favorite for the Democratic nomination, but ultimately lost because of an incident known as “The Dean Scream,” in which he yelled “Yeah!” in an enthusiastic way after a speech. The cable and broadcast news channels played the clip incessantly, and the end result was that Dean lost the New Hampshire primary, where he had been up by 30 points, and therefore lost any real chance of being the Democratic nominee. Two candidates who were considered more moderate (this may seem hard to believe, but John Edwards was considered a southern centrist in 2004) ended up being the presidential and Vice Presidential nominees. But Howard Dean wasn’t finished.

Howard Dean decided that he was going to become chairman of the Democratic national committee, and actually campaigned for the position. He was opposed by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democratic big wigs, but ultimately won the chairmanship of the DNC over more centrist opponents. His early plans were to implement a “50-state plan,” in which the Democrats would build organizations in every single precinct in the country, regardless of the Democratic presence or lack thereof, and would raise money in the same way that Dean raised money; from hundreds of thousands of small donors. The big question, though was why such a strategy would work in 2008 when it didn’t work in 2004. The answer was Barack Obama.

Obama’s 2008 campaign was conspicuously similar to Dean’s 2004 campaign. Both of them were running against the prohibitively favored Clinton establishment (if you remember, Lieberman was the favorite early in the 2004 campaign, Clinton was the favorite in the 2008 campaign). Both were lacking in experience and lacking in establishment support, but both got a big boost early on by a major endorsement by a prominent member of the establishment (Obama by Ted Kennedy, Dean by Al Gore). Both ran an anti-war campaign from the left side of the Democratic party, and both used grassroots support to raise record amounts of money from small donors. The difference was not only that Barack Obama was a superior politician to Dean, but that the Democratic party had changed over the three years that Howard Dean had been DNC chairman. The progressive wing of the Democratic party had become the mainstream Democratic party, and centrism was no longer considered the best way to win an election after the failures in 2000 and 2004. People were tired of technocrats and wanted a real Democrat, and they found it with Barack Obama.

I would argue, however, that this election does not mean that centrism is dead, so much as that the political center of this country has moved. The majority of the country supports universal health care, abortion rights, stem-cell research, stricter fuel efficiency, and preserving social security, while the majority of the country opposes the Iraq war and the Bush tax cuts. Most strikingly, for the first time in polling history, half of Americans support gay marriage, and more than half the country believes the government should be doing more, not less. All of this indicates that the country has moved to the left of where it was before on the ideological spectrum, and that Barack Obama, who was considered an “ideologue” by many pundits and conservative politicians, may represent what the new political center of the country is. How else do we explain the fact that Al Gore, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton have moved from the center to the left while Joe Lieberman, who has essentially remained in the same place, has gone from a face of the Democratic party to being in consideration for ejection from the caucus? There is a new era of progressivism in our politics, and if the Republicans don’t realize that the country might want to elect Rockefeller Republicans, but is no longer fond of neocons, then they’re just going to have to sit around and wait for the country to change ideologically again.

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