Don't blame the former Democratic front-runner's collapse on the yodel, the Internet, or anything else. The fault belongs entirely to Dean himself.
It was the stuff of legend. One day Howard Dean was just another body in the political morgue of the also-rans. The next, it seemed he had opened up a commanding lead on men who had come to the field with better name recognition, more Congressional experience, and a stronger sense of entitlement. He graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, then the papers. The TV news got on the bandwagon and traffic on his web site exploded. He blew past fundraising records set by incumbent Bill Clinton, and the overwhelming majority of that money came from citizens' $25- and $50-dollar donations. The liberal ex-governor of Vermont was suddenly The Man to Know in the Democratic Party.
Pundits were eager to point to the Internet as the source of Dean's meteoric rise. With many journalists unable or unwilling to equate Dean's unusual political stands with his appeal, Howard Dean's coverage was as much about the campaign as the candidate. Dean's victory in MoveOn.org's straw poll catapulted him into the national spotlight. His use of the twin Internet phenomena of blogging and MeetUp set the new gold standard for campaign communication. Many argued that the New New Democrat was not distinguished by his beliefs so much as his manner of expression. The Old New Democrats had blogs up within weeks. The political Internet had arrived and its candidate was a shoo-in.
Then Dean got drubbed in Iowa, placing a bleak distant third in the state's caucus. The same media that heralded his arrival pronounced him dead, made frequent and inevitable comparisons to the dot-com bubble, and set about making the outspoken doctor-politician the biggest political joke since George McGovern. TV was still king and kingmaker in political coverage. The blog, MeetUp, the army of the tech-savvy, and the Internet itself — all of these shiny new things had failed Howard Dean and failed him completely. End of legend.
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It's easy to blame Dean's early wins and crushing defeat on the Internet. It's more than easy; it's appealing. If Dean's coolness is due to anything other than the Internet's coolness, then lifelong Democrats and party leadership alike must accept that the Democratic Party is due for a serious, agonizing shake-up. If his failure is due to anything other than the Internet's failure, then Howard Dean, his staffers, his powerful endorsers, and his committed supporters must accept that there is much wrong with the candidate and the campaign. Both of these observations are uncomfortable, but both of them are true.
The fact is that Dean's story is very simple. It's also very old. It has precisely nothing to do with the Web. Take a page from the endless postmortems of the "bubble" of the '90s. A good company does not need the Internet to survive, and the best Web site in the world will not make up for a lousy product.
The speeches of Howard Dean the underdog —a man so many Democrats found so appealing —touched on issues America is starved for. He talked about healthcare and how everybody could get it; he talked about balancing the budget; he talked about a nuanced foreign policy; he spoke of "rebuilding the coalition of the able." He offered average Americans something they had not had for decades: the opportunity to speak to the powerful and be heard. If you want to find the source of Dean's appeal, you might start there.
In contrast, the speeches of Howard Dean the front-runner are an echo chamber of self-admiration. In the weeks leading up to Iowa, he didn't talk about his fantastic record in Vermont. He didn't talk about his career as a doctor. He didn't talk about his innovative Success by Six program, his brilliant national health care plan, or the fact that he was re-elected five times and balanced Vermont's budget 11 years in a row. He talked about his outspoken opposition to the war, and he talked about how cool his campaign was. That was it. If you want to find the reason Dean lost Iowa — and quite possibly the nomination — you might start there.
Such speeches were representative of the profound arrogance that permeated the Dean campaign in December and January. The attitude that Dean was the most powerful man in the party consumed the candidate, his staff, and his supporters at the same rate as his rise in the polls. It's easy to understand why; Dean's candidacy changed from a footnote in the Democratic race to the Democratic race in just a few weeks. The man had won the lottery. What was truly inexcusable was the way Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, allowed their inflated egos to become institutionalized. Glorifying the campaign became the purpose of the campaign.
The only conceivable way for Dean to lose was for him to screw up, so screw-ups were ignored. Dean's primary focus became securing his base, not romancing independents, open-minded Republicans, and the 70 percent of Democrats who stood with a different guy.
Dean's much-touted grassroots did its job. It didn't fail. Gross shortcomings of the organization — a terrible communications strategy, crappy commercials, a stale stump speech, a rapidly outdated Weblog, poor caucus training, and the inevitable falling polls — were discussed by Dean's army of unpaid staffers. They told the campaign when it was in trouble. But an endless chorus of big-name endorsements and deliberate misinformation drowned their concerns out.
When polls started showing Dean taking the plunge in Iowa, polls didn't appear on the blog anymore. When it became clear that Dean would not take first and would at least have a hard fight for second, the campaign's spokesman guaranteed 40,000 people would show up for Dean. High schools would empty, colleges would clear, and first-time voters would line up for a Howard Dean windfall in Iowa. That's what Dean's faithful were told, and because many of them were new to politics themselves, that's what they believed.
The Dean for America campaign committed one of the most grievous, most common, and oldest sins of leadership. Fat on success, brimming with easy money, it became obsessed with its own story — so obsessed that it turned people away. When it did, it did not do the progressive thing, the honest thing, the right thing. It did not admit its shortcomings and regroup. In a desperate bid to hold on to their base, Dean and Trippi finally lied. They allowed staffers and spokesmen to create a misleading picture of what was going on in Iowa. They didn't do it for the benefit of the media, they didn't do it to attract new supporters, and they certainly didn't do it because of the Internet. They did it because they screwed up and they couldn't admit it.
That 18 percent of Iowa's Democratic voters turned out for Howard Dean the front-runner is a testament to the trust, passion, patriotism, and loyalty of Dean supporters. In this era of cynicism and bitterness, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans remain in Dean's corner is extraordinary. The Internet did not fail Howard Dean. It worked precisely the way it was supposed to, and it's still working.
