The Dean Meltdown: An Analysis
Paramendra Bhagat
February 8, 2004

Kerry's momentum has only got bigger. He carried Michigan and Washington, and Dean's second places in both is not the same jolt as it might have been in the early weeks. Maine looks going Kerry's way. Wisconsin is to be Dean's official last stand. And the polls there are not exactly promising. Whereas the two southerners Clark and Edwards battle it out in Virginia and Tennessee, Kerry looks strong those places as well.

The delegate count is Kerry 409, Dean 174, Edwards 116, Clark 82, Sharpton 12 and Kucinich 2.

The voter is always right. That is democracy. But that is also the source well for effective political campaigning. That is the measuring stick to which you apply your novel ideas. Just like in business they say the customer is always right.

I was with some local Deaniacs in downtown Indianapolis in the basement of Rock Bottom this past Saturday, awaiting returns for the day. And we passed around this wishful thought that perhaps Kerry will put Dean on the ticket. Or perhaps bring him in into the cabinet for Health and Human Services. It might be pragmatic for not only the Dean crowd, but also those of others in the race to gather around Kerry once he is the nominee. A clearing of the air, and a healing of wounds might be the thing to do. And Kerry might pick someone totally unforeseen. But the time for that has not come yet. Two New Englanders is not that bad of an idea. Bill Clinton picked his neighbor Al Gore. But then Kerry might be no Clinton. And a geographical balance mighte be big on his mind. Maybe Gephardt? Maybe Edwards? Gephardt is the only one he did not have a big fight with. And it was the Gephardt-Dean fight that propelled Kerry in Iowa in the first place.

Perhaps Hillary? That would excite me about the campaign all over again. Although a Senator from New York, she grew up in the Mid-West, the so-called battleground states, and spent much time in the proverbial South with "Bubba." And perhaps it might be time to look at the gender geography. And that would bring Bill Clinton back in in a curious way. But Kerry might fear being outshined and so might use the geographical balance excuse to not consider Hillary. Does Hillary even desire to be considered?

All that is for later. For now, I just want to ask, so why did Dean fizzle out? I think a good answer to that question are two current figures. Kerry's website that I visited for the first time ever this past Saturday shows he has raised $1.7 million since January 27. Well, Dean raised the bat for Wisconsin for 700,000 dollars and that goal was so quickly reached, he doubled the goal, and is well on his way to meeting it. And that in less than a week. Looks like the core Dean supporters who propelled him in the polls for the second half of last year are still there, strong as ever. Dean never lost that crowd. What perhaps failed him is that he was not able to go beyond that "echo chamber."

What about people who don't know what a blog is? People who don't venture online much? People who did not tune in last year? People for whom TV is their primary source of news? People who are cynical by the young Dean crowd standards? People who bought into the media characterizations? People for whom the sound bites and TV ads are made? People for whom the idea of "real change" is outlandish?

Let's face it, Dean did not look "good" on television. Just like it is said, Nixon won the Nixon-Kennedy debates for those who listened to it on radio, but he lost it on TV. Dean won it online, but he lost it on TV. Cold, hard, ground political reality. TV continues to be the central medium. The Dean campaign ackowledged that all along. All that money raised, most of it went into TV ads. With broadband, when it comes mainstream, text, audio and video might all be online. But TV will not disapper, it will morph. And it will probably remain center stage. Because to most people how you look on TV is how you might look in their living rooms, as you do! TV as a medium also was like Microsoft. It saw the net, the startup Netscape, and fought back with a vengeance, almost like an organism. There was no committee behind the move, but the act(s) did take place.

But the medium is not the message, and so there has to be a larger explanation. Dean really represented real change. Fundamental change. And when you do that, you pit yourself against powerful interests. And those powerful interests fight back. And they fight hard. And it is not easy to go beyond that. And so the Dean promise did not deliver political-skillwise.

The average contribution to Dean has been $77. Those are not people for whom that is a paltry sum. And Dean raised record sums of money. Over $40 million just past year. But that money was spent like it was a sum of contributions from big money people, with abandon. Some say if Dean had Kerry's momentum now, the issue of money would not have come up. There might be some truth to that. We would all have been hailing Trippi as a genius. And I don't want to be hard on him overly. He cultivated a new mechanism that gave many hope. But that unwise draining of over 40 million dollars also brought the campaign to its knees when it most needed to fight, like right after New Hampshire, which was when Dean might have gained some momentum. And I am also left asking why was Trippi's firm getting most of the business from the Dean campaign? Am I the only person who sees some conflict of interest there?

The campaign also lacked flexibility. When "gaffes" were made, and if they did not go down well with the electorate, not the elite but the electorate, maybe it is time to listen and change course, instead of plodding along saying it is straight talk.

One thing that really amazes me is the campaign's not getting the idea of momentum early on, or getting it and not having a plan B. We kept painting the map with leads in the polls. This state looks good, on to the next, and so on. Whereas Kerry's entire strategy was based on momentum. He dug into Iowa in the final weeks, and he was not much other places in the country. Those will come later on, he correctly guessed.

But the most important explanation for why Dean fizzled out is John Kerry himself. Give the guy credit. He got the votes, the victories, the delegates, the momentum. We don't have to understand everything he is doing to appreciate what he is doing. His gravitas shows. He wears his Vietnam experience like high school memories instead of displaying it in a gaudy way. Some might argue his having raised more "special interest" money than any Senator in the past 15 years is actually a big plus, shows he can move and shake within the system. And I kind of like it that Kerry's wife grew up in Africa.

The war on terror is far from over, it will likely last decades, and Kerry's decorated Vietnam Vet status, and experience on the Senate Intelligence Committee come across as reassuring. He does not antagonize the DLC type New Democrats, and still manages to reach out to those further left, whereas Dean was far too focused on the left. I used to feel mainstream rooting for Dean. Now I relate to the Kucinich crowd, right but weak.

But hopefully this is not the end of Dean, and not the end of the Dean optimism, and the Dean generation. And the Internet will be much more central in the next campaign, or even this one down the line. The innocence has been lost, but the memories will live on.