A Dean Revival/Consolidation Is Possible
Paramendra Bhagat
February 16, 2004

Wisconsin looks bad for our guy. And if Kerry wins big there, he will likely also carry places like California, New York, Ohio and Florida. So to me it clearly feels like we are over as a serious candidate. I think we have more in affinity with the Kucinich crowd than the Kerry crowd now. Our policies are great, but we failed on the hard rock of political reality. We lost this round.

But only a few days back I was thinking maybe a Dean revival is possible. It would be about going back to the roots, to the close to 640,000 people who have signed up to be part of the campaign.

How could you do that? Go back to the roots. When people who can barely afford to do so pitch 20 and 30 and 150 and 200 dollars, you go ahead and spend all that on TV ads - well, it was not that cut and dry, but still - so bad that you have to skip the next so many primaries ... well, Dean did not lose in Iowa and New Hampshire. He lost when he skipped February 3 for lack of money. Any chances of revival were gone.

The record 41 million dollars were ill spent. That money alone should have lasted all the way to the convention. That is my primary criticism. That money should have been spent the way it was collected, out of respect for the small donors, with the utmost thrift. Instead it was spent with much abandon, and both Dean and Trippi should accept responsibility for that.

But as of now the defeating strategy has been to keep collecting that small money and then use that to feed the monster: the mainstream media, all those TV ads.

Would it not be better if the campaign instead sold CDs and DVDs from the campaign site that would be superior to those spots in content, and that would not be copyrighted, so that we 640,000 of us could help the fundraising by purchasing those and burning them for cheap locally and using our personal networks to reach out to voters, groud-up? That would be cheap, that would be effective. That would be grass roots.

To the point of Iowa, our campaign spent much energy trying to "sell" the issues, but we failed on trying to "sell" the man. His biography should have been much better known. Before people can relate to Dean's policies, they have to relate to Dean as a person. A Dean biography on DVD could help, something perhaps feature length, with interviews from people from different periods of his life, visuals, pictures from the family album, all those details that would humanize the nice guy who has been dehumanized by the media. And the CD/DVD idea would be a slap to the soundbites, the 30-second spots. We are feeding the same monster that helped bring us down, the edited 30-second spot of the "scream" that was played by traditional media again and again and again.

But no point being a sore loser. Face it, we lost. We were going to the White House. And now we are not going to. And so the next emphasis should be consolidation.

We consolidate by keeping our networks alive, because our substance is still there, and they are going to enter the mainstream in a few years. So we have to keep the hope alive by not withering away. We have to carry on with our Dean identity. The Dean Democrats are distinctive. And maybe the doctor will give the whole thing a second try next time around. That could be a page from the Ronald Reagan book.

I don't feel like quitting though. I don't begrudge Kerry. He is a great guy. But Kerry is no movement, he is a presidential campaign. Dean was a movement. I wish something could hapen to jolt us back in. Maybe the Dean volunteers in California will take up on the CD/DVD idea and turn things around early in March. You bring the costs drastically down, as in the campaign only spends money on production initially, and then sells them as a creative fundraising effort, or perhaps sells them for really cheap. I mean, if the idea is to get on people's screens.