Pacific Views

Miami Herald On Dean

I got the chance to speak to Peter Wallsten of the Miami Herald after the Sleepless Summer rally in Portland. He usually covers the Graham campaign, and here's what he told me about his differing impressions of the two:

...There are huge differences. You know, Graham is a candidate who has a long record of elected service in the Senate, and as governor of Florida. And yet he has no traction, his campaign has no excitement. He goes on the road, and he gets crowds of 20, 25 people, maybe 30, sometimes maybe 100. But nothing like this, the rally today where there were thousands of people.

[...] There hasn't been that kind of intensity around the Graham campaign. And as a result, Graham is near the bottom of the polls in the Democratic primaries, in the early primaries, and Dean is at the top. It's the kind of surge that the Graham campaign would love to have.

But you really see the differences. And actually, what it comes down to is the differences in the candidates, how they articulate their message, and what kind of intensity that results in as far as the supporters. And Dean has intensity. The people who like Dean really know him and like him. I think people still don't know Bob Graham outside of Florida, and the way the campaign is going, they may never get a chance to know him.

Here are excerpts from the recent article he wrote about Dean's insurgency, soon to vanish into the Herald's paid archives:

Howard Dean, the once-unknown physician-turned-governor of a tiny state, climbed to the podium in a downtown Seattle park this week and looked out in amazement at the scene below: 10,000 people, chanting his name in unison.

It was the largest crowd to gather anywhere this year for a Democratic presidential candidate -- until the following night, when about 15,000 crammed into a park near New York's Times Square to chant Dean's name and boo President Bush.

...For all of the glory of his campaign's surprising success, Dean is about to undergo the test of a lifetime: The scrutiny and scorn from opponents in his own party, who view him as too liberal to pose a potent challenge to Bush; from Republicans seeking to discredit a potential Democratic nominee; and from a national media eager to dig into the life and times of an obscure former governor of a largely white state with a third the population of Miami-Dade County.

...The party's centrists worry that Dean's strategy -- mobilizing hundreds of thousands of activists using websites and the in-vogue interactive commentary called ''blogging'' -- will hand President Bush a landslide next year. ...

Hear that folks? Our party thinks we're going to hand Bush a landslide. Because, um, that's what happens when you mobilize thousands of previously apathetic people into being interested in politics, I guess. More on that later.

He goes on to discuss changes in position regarding the death penalty, tax cuts, welfare, and retirement age. Closing with remarks indicating that it's odd, or at least naive, for Mrs. Dean to continue her medical practice and expect not to be woken up by the phone in the middle of the night. However, he left the last word to the candidate:

...Pressed by a reporter that the public expects first ladies to take up a cause, Dean shot back: "She'll take care of patients. I think that's a pretty good cause.''

As to the party thinking that we're driving it off a cliff, the opening comments of another article in the Herald this last week by Joy-Ann Reid about young Democrats summed things up pretty well:

In making the rounds of the Democratic Party faithful in the last few months, I've developed my working definition of Democratic activist: a person of indeterminate age who votes, volunteers and can't get party leaders to return his or her phone calls.

Where Republicans seem to seize on anyone who shows the slightest interest in advancing the party's quest for power -- no matter how tenuous their connection to core GOP beliefs, or indeed, to politics on this planet (see Arnold Schwarzenegger) -- the Democrats often seem to hold their best potential assets at arms length.

...The founders of 2020Democrats.com -- Josh Green, 25, and Jorge Miranda, 23 -- are exactly what the party should want to build its future on: They're smart (they went to Dartmouth together), highly motivated and brimming with ideas. ...

...After last year's midterm elections, and the Democrats' second drubbing by the hardball GOP, Green and Miranda started putting their heads together and recruiting their friends. They were frustrated that the party missed key opportunities to speak to young people. Green's take was that the Democrats too often make the "tactical mistake of asking for young people's votes and time as volunteers, without asking for their ideas.''

''If you take a step back and look at how weak the party's support is among young people, it's frightening,'' Green said. ...

So how has the party responded to this spontaneous burst of enthusiasm? Green was diplomatic. ''We've been in contact with a variety of groups, [...]There was no strong response either way.''

...The surge in participation by the creative, motivated, gutsy freight train that is the Dean campaign is nothing short of a watershed for the DNC. The Dean faithful (along with the movement to draft Gen. Wesley Clark and the voter-rights push repped by Al Sharpton and the Hip Hop Summit Action Network) are the kind of grass-roots that groundswell political parties usually only dream of.

So how is the Democratic Party responding to the fresh ideas, fresh enthusiasm and fresh money coming into the process? By scorning them -- and by fearing, rather than cultivating, them.

Talk about being in the political wilderness.

Sounds like somebody gets it. Too bad that somebody isn't Al From.

Posted by natasha at September 3, 2003 01:53 PM | TrackBack