Runnin’ On Theory: Soon To Be The Most Poweful Man In America?

This is the first record I could find of contact between the man who is soon to be the most powerful man in America and Barack Obama.  Yep, if Obama is elected, Howard Dean will become kingmaker, and as usual, he will have bungled his way to “the top.”

When I went looking into the connections between Howard Dean and Barack Obama, I fully expected to find evidence of Dean’s vengegence-fueled, behind-the-scenes machinations driving Barack Obama’s 50-state bus to the White house, with the aid of compliant Netroots mechanics, and I did.  What I didn’t expect to find was the degree of Dagwood Bumstead-style, hapless bungling involved.

Don’t get me wrong; I always knew that neither Dean or Obama really had any reason to believe their convergent, novel approaches would work, or that either of them would really have a clue how to govern if their efforts were rewarded.  In fact, in two previous “Runnin’ On Theory” and “Runnin’ On Theory: The Beauty Shop Campaign,”posts, I said so.  However, it wasn’t until recently, after days of internet surfing, searching and Googling, that I found out just how clueless both men are.  Especially Howard Dean.

The story of Dean’s unsuccessful presidential bid, as well as his innovative fundraising and grassroots campaigning, has been chronicled to death.  So has his now famous feud with the more “centrist” factions of the Democratic party.  What’s not been so well chronicled is the fact that Dean calls himself a “centrist,” and he lucked into the internet innovation that propelled him to the forefront of a contest he never expected to win.  And while Dean may appear to have hand-picked Obama to be the vehicle of his revenge, it’s just as true, if not moreso, that Obama’s camp used Dean’s blind spot to hijack the party.

Dean’s Dean For America campaign organization which later morphed into Democracy For America, a grassroots coalition which tapped Barack Obama as one of Dean’s Dozen almost as soon as it transitioned after he dropped out of the presidential race in 2004, embraced the internet early.  From a website called Lessig, July 14, 2003:

Hello from the Dean for America campaign. Governor Howard Dean will be posting later today, here and at the official campaign blog, Blog for America. It’s our policy that whenever Governor Dean posts anywhere on the Internet, his posts will also be crossposted to our site.

Lawrence Lessig is still involved in internet politics, recently spearheading a “bi-partisan” letter-writing campaign urging debate format reform, as well as an earlier, similar “bi-partisan” effort requesting that the DeaNC make debate footage free.  Barack Obama also wrote a separate letter of his own.  The cast of internet characters in both instances overlaps quite a bit.

Though Dean has been quoted as advocating for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party,” decrying what he perceived to be the rightward shift in ideology, in this interview with Mother Jones, October, 2004, Dean, promoting his just completed book, “You Have The Power: How To Take Back Our Country And Restore Democracy In America,” said this:

MJ.com: In the book, you say your positions haven’t changed much from when you were a delegate for Jimmy Carter, but that the party has shifted to the right around you.

HD: It’s true. And the remarkable shift didn’t really occur to me until after I ran for president, because in Vermont I was very much a centrist. I mean, my positions on gun control are probably a little more conservative than most people in the Democratic Party, although I did support the assault-weapons ban and all that. But my position on the death penalty is disturbing to some of my liberal friends, because I do support it in a few instances. I balanced twelve consecutive budgets. And yet, I was the most liberal guy out there other than the three candidates who really didn’t have a chance at winning! Well, that’s ridiculous. What happened to the spectrum of opinion in the Democratic Party? If I’m the most liberal guy and I’m in the center, that means the entire party is moving to the right — except for those who supported me.

Since that makes no sense to me, it seems that Dean was merely attempting to justify his anger at the “centrists” who mocked him, and in his mind, caused him to lose.  If he was indeed, a “centrist” and had won, it’s likely he would have embraced the political shift as natural evolution.  Yet, it was those old school “centrists” who weren’t yet sold on his theory with whom he had a beef.  In the same article, Dean once again sang the praises of the young Illinois state senator, whom he had earlier endorsed, who was running for the national office he now holds, and for whom Dean was campaigning at that time.

MJ.com: Who else have you supported?

HD: Barack Obama was an early one, because a lot of our people in the Illinois primary were working for him at the same time they were working for me. So we kind of discovered Barack before he was Barack. (laughs)

Since by this point, Dean was stumping for Kerry and the only thing Obama had done of note was speak at the convention, one wonders if Dean was responsible for the Kerry/Obama hook-up.

Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was notable for it’s fundraising and internet usage, though there was no real reason to expect any of them to work.  I found an interactive Howard Dean For Iowa game, and a Dean For America fundraising bat.  However, by all accounts, it was stumbling upon Meetup.com that made the difference.  According to Joe Trippi, Dean’s former campaign manager, it was all an accident.

The Dean movement was another beast entirely. According to the conventional wisdom, it managed to raise both far more money and far more enthusiasm than its rivals because it used the Internet. In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, his bombastic but instructive memoir, Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, stands that formula on its head. “We were not using the Internet,” he writes. “It was using us.”

He has a point. An election professional who entered presidential politics working for Ted Kennedy in 1980, Trippi had also toiled for several tech companies during the Clinton years. With one foot in the political world and the other in cyberspace, he didn’t invent his candidate’s Internet offensive so much as he discovered and magnified it. Every political junkie knows that Trippi and Dean built their movement by embracing Meetup.com, a company that arranges get-togethers for people who share a common interest–anyone from disgruntled Scientologists to fans of Angelina Jolie. What isn’t as widely appreciated is that Dean’s supporters were already using Meetup.com to find each other before the campaign even knew the service existed.

Indeed, when Trippi first saw the site, “the first thing I noticed was that Howard Dean–dead last among the Democratic candidates in almost every other meaningful measurement–was actually leading in this one category, the number of his supporters who wanted to meet up.” He added a link to Meetup.com from the campaign Web site, and with that small piece of HTML code the number of Dean backers in the system suddenly leaped from 432 to 2,700. “For months,” Trippi recalls, “Meetup.com would run its own parallel campaign, the number of people meeting up growing from that initial 432 to more than 190,000. Eventually, we’d even have to create our own, specialized version of Meetup–the GetLocal tools, which would grow to 170,000 people on its own.” When Trippi persuaded Dean to attend a meetup himself during a stop in Manhattan, the number of fans planning to attend started to multiply; he ended up speaking to 500 people in a fully packed hall, with another 300 or 400 waiting outside.

Trippi also has other insights into the Dean phenomenon.  In this July 2004 MSNBC piece, Trippi alleges that it was not Dean’s famous scream, nor his centrist enemies that did him in, it was Howard himself.  In quotes from his book, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Trippi claims to have known Dean was doomed in Iowa.  He also says that Howard Dean knew it, too.  One of the many mistakes Dean made, besides barging uninvited into a Martin Luther King celebration, and being thrown out, was to refuse to release his medical records, undermining his claims of a new kind of transparent politics.  After debating the point with his staff one night in December of 2003, Dean once again refuses, effectively sealing his ultimate doom, and after retreating to a quit corner to confer with Trippi, makes this confession:

“This. I never thought it would go this far. I was going to raise my profile, raise health care as an issue, shake up the Democratic Party. Help change the country. But I never thought this would happen. Don’t you understand?” He turns and faces me. “I never thought I could actually win. I wanted to . . . but I never really thought it could happen.”

This was not to be the last time Dean underestimated himself and his strategy.  In an October, 2006 article, when it looked like Dean’s strategy would lead to unprecedented Democratic election success, Dean seemed shocked:

“I didn’t expect much to come of this strategy for four or even six years,” Dean told TIME.

Neither did anyone else.  In June of this year, The Huffington Post ran a story detailing the relationship between Obama’s “nomination” (selection) as Democratic presidential nominee and Dean’s 50 state strategy.  Referring to Dean’s uphill climb for acceptance within his own party, HuffPo quoted Paul Begala:

“He says it’s a long-term strategy,” said Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton aide and Democratic strategist. “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”

If Obama is indeed elected president, Dean will finally be fully vindicated.  And while he most assuredly had a hand in Obama’s success, it could be argued that Obama is far more significant to him than he is to Obama.  Camp O recognized Dean’s techniques as tools to be used to their benefit.  Dean sees Obama’s success as vindication.  But once vindicated, instead of being venerated, he is most likely to be relegated to obscurity.  For Howard bought the shiny new Obama car without bothering to kick the tires.  Obama has no intention of sharing the spotlight, in fact, he is not at all the “breath of fresh air” Dean initially presumed him to be.  Obama/Axelrod and Co. have a far different, not so innocent agenda for which Dean provided the road map they’ve used to pursue it.  And while Obama’s success may vindicate the strategy, the O Team is not likely to allow it to elevate the man.

This time, Dean may have convinced himself he could win, and this time, again, he’ll be wrong.

Next up: Howard, Barack and the Bad Boyz of the Blogosphere