I’ve got an opportunity (Allah Akbar!) to do a little retrospective writing about my days on the Dean campaign, the whole DeanSpace thing in particular, and perhaps maybe get it published as part of an anthology style book. So I’m going to be writing about this.
My style is to write what I feel, and some of what I’m doing is good, I think, but off-topic. Hence, this post.
Epilogue
For a minute it seemed like we might be branching out of the mean zero-sum game of traditional politics, like we could break the old muscle game, the turf wars, the whole 51% shuffle, everyone fighting over the same endorsements, the same TV show slots, the same pool of “likely voters.” It felt like we really might grow our way to victory, take the prize simply by doing the right thing and widening the circle of participation.
Implicit in this vision was that if we went all the way, this is how the Dean Administration would be run as well. It represented the idea of a complete recapitulation of the Bush/Cheney gestalt — not just a reversal on policy, but on the means and modes of governance as well. We dreamed of building an inclusive and transparent movement that could not only win elections, but also support a true national consensus; of the re-emergence of that classic standard of democracy, the Public Interest.
It was happening, and I believed — still believe — it would have kept happening if we’d made it past Iowa.
But we got beat on the ground by a stronger machine. Kerry came back from the brink with an incredible close — his vietnam buddies, coming in via helicopter — and his organization made an 11th-hour alliance with Gov.. Tom Vilsack which really sealed the deal. A caucus is a complicated thing. Not many people show up, and it’s not at all like voting. Vilsack’s machine was strong and deep, and they made the most of the situation, easily besting our inexperienced, outnumbered, and largely out-of-state operation.
That alone would have been a crippling setback, but we also got beat like a gong on the air. The ad strategy had been off-target in the closing weeks of 2003, and the hostile media environment was taking a toll, and then there was the post-Caucus concession speech, aka “the scream.”
The scream ranks right up there with Colin Powell’s UN hustle as one of the great specific moments of failure for our media and press. It was but moment, but one that will go down in any honest history as the apotheosis of sound-bytes.
Think of it. There are no words, just a sound. “YEAAAA!” Over and over and over, just that sound.
Of course, it was taken out of context. It was essentially a live moment, a real interaction between the man on the stage and the people in the room. Footage from the crowd which surfaced after the fact shows that from the audience you could barely hear the man talk, let alone pick out a scream.
Whether it was out of context or not, the scream fit perfectly into every negative narrative. Drudge posted an audio clip before any story was written. He knew. Reporters at the scene didn’t think there was a story, but savvy observers watching via television could see. Drudge put it up, and that made it news, and that byte of sound was repeated hundreds of times across every major news outlet over the next week.
These days, and increasingly now, you have a better chance of pushing back against manipulation like this, with your own footage if you’ve got it. Think “Macacca” if you need an instance of how things have changed. But in this moment as in many, we were a bit ahead of the times. There was literally no defense, and given those were the rules of the game at the time, from a brass-tacks point of view, we deserved to lose.
And so, in New Hampshire, where we actually grew the kind of authentic grassroots ground organization that could have contended in a caucus — and which, I can add with pride, held together and has elected a couple of members of congress of late — there was a primary. There was a general uncomplicated vote for which most rank and file Democrats showed up to participate, and we finished second, and then we lost.
