The final days of the Dean campaign felt like a good party that had lasted a bit too long. Venues grew smaller, attendance more sparse. Staffers began talking about imminent vacations involving warm beaches and umbrella drinks, to places like New Orleans (in time for Mardi Gras) or Bermuda. Even so, the campaign stuck to its ambitious, events-heavy schedule, methodically moving from one frosty Wisconsin burg to another. On afternoon trips, some on the Dean campaign bus passed time counting the ice fisherman sitting on frozen ponds visible from the highway.
Here’s what Howard Dean got out of Wisconsin (or at least, what he brought back with him on his final campaign flight): five cases of Milwaukee’s own Sprecher soft drinks, picked up at a last-minute campaign stop (three cases of root beer, one of “orange dream,” one of cream soda.) Several hefty stacks of “Howard Dean for America” campaign signs. A slew of campaign-distributed foam cheese heads. Two dozen members of the traveling press. Six staffers. And one third-place finish. In all, a nice haul; but like the rest of the Dean effort, a little short of expectations. On Wednesday, Howard Dean finally conceded the obvious. “I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency,” he told the crowd of supporters that packed a ballroom at the Sheraton Burlington. “We will, however, continue to build a new organization using our enormous grassroots network to continue the effort to transform the Democratic party, and to change our country.”
Even for someone who publicly dismissed both “pollsters and pundits,” the final days of the campaign had been a study in slow decline. As some unions that had supported the former Vermont governor (like the influential AFSCME municipal employees union) began to pull their endorsements, the union members that had provided some of the most visible bodies at campaign events vanished practically overnight. Almost daily, the morning papers laid out on the campaign plane had featured front-page campaign post-mortems; reporters openly referred to the Dean beat as the “death watch.” (Journalists nicknamed the plane itself “Gambler I” in honor of a previous user, singer Kenny Rogers; one scribe teasingly prodded Dean to recite the lyrics of that song: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold’ em, know when to walk away, know when to run…” He declined.) As the days passed, and confusion reigned over the campaign’s immediate future, drastic spending cutbacks made painfully clear what the candidate himself wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
In fact, until last night’s third-place finish, Howard Dean alone had seemed unwilling or unable to accept that his run for the White House was over. Even as campaign leadership (like chairman Steve Grossman and master blogger Mathew Gross) departed and news coverage began to dry up, Dean periodically insisted he planned to compete in next month’s major-state primaries. His view of the campaign’s plans seemed to change daily, or even hourly. But on some level, at least, he must have realized the end was near. On Saturday night, while the other major candidates addressed the party faithful at a fundraising gala in downtown Milwaukee, Howard Dean decided to attend his son’s final high school hockey game in Burlington instead. (For the record, the junior Dean’s team, the Seahorses, won 6-1.)
Dean had repeatedly told Wisconsinites from La Crosse to Sheboygan that when they went to the polls, his fortunes would shift because “we’ll hear from you, not the pollsters and pundits.” Late Tuesday night, it seemed he finally heard the voters loud and clear, even if he didn’t like what they had to say. The former Vermont governor had spent a solid week-and-a-half crisscrossing the state, delivering his stump speech everywhere from dairy farms to Sunday morning services, but wound up with barely half the votes received by either Kerry or Edwards, who had split their time between Wisconsin and other voting states.
Howard Dean’s campaign began with a URL and a handful of volunteer staffers, surged to the lead last summer with a message that came to define the race-then watched the other Democratic candidates define themselves largely as Dean alternatives, even as they co-opted elements of his stump speech, some of his strategy, and eventually, his lead. His Web-based revolution went through a series of intense growing pains, while media scrutiny of a series of verbal and tactical stumbles sent his poll numbers tumbling.
To the end, at least a few “Deaniacs” still followed the candidate from state to state. In the frigid air outside a Madison polling place on election night, a pink-cheeked group that included several of these campaign groupies and a swarm of college students greeted him with pleas to stay in the race. “Don’t stop, we’re with you,” begged one woman.
Some Dean supporters immediately pledged to support the Democratic nominee, whoever that might be. “I’ll vote for anybody but Bush,” said Eric Phillips, 23, a Dean volunteer. Others waited for the next instruction from Howard Dean. “We’ll follow him, and support him, whatever he decides,” said Linda Hansen, 56, a disconsolate Wisconsin homemaker surveying the crowd at Dean’s primary night gathering in Madison. Hansen’s devotion, unfortunately for the Democratic party, doesn’t extend far enough for her to contemplate voting for John Kerry, no matter the direction from Dean.
By the end, as establishment candidate John Kerry won contest after contest, Dean’s message had shifted. In the first days after New Hampshire, he’d adopted a stinging anti-Kerry stump speech, comparing the Massachusetts senator to President Bush, and calling him a “special-interest clone.” But as the Wisconsin campaign wound down, he softened his attacks on the new front-runner. “My opponents are all good men. Honestly, I think I think anybody in this race would be preferable to President Bush,” became his biggest applause line. His speech Wednesday stressed the theme: “The bottom line is that we must beat George W. Bush in November, no matter what it takes.”
Despite his lack of electoral success, and the complete depletion of the campaign’s initial $40 million war chest, the money never stopped flowing in from the small donors that have come to define the Dean machine. One of the campaign’s major legacies is a massive database of the newly involved voters and donors that funded its rise, and a party hungry to tap that resource. Exactly what Howard Dean plans to do with that list - and the delegates he’s already amassed and may continue to gather in states where his name remains on the ballot-still remains unclear. Dean stressed party loyalty Wednesday, adding in reference to the hundreds of thousands of die-hard Dean supporters, “We are not going away. We’re staying together unified, all of us.”
At Dean’s final, unusually well-attended pre-vote rally in a Madison theater, he mused on the recent Wisconsin primary debate, where other Democratic candidates echoed the Dean campaign memes. One by one, he ticked off a list of issues, largely absent from party discussion before his campaign, that had now moved to the forefront. For all the weeks spent defining victory downwards in an effort to keep his candidacy alive, it was clear Howard Dean had finally realized a different measure of his success. “That’s one of the reasons we started this out. To put the spine back in the Democratic Party,” he said, to wild cheers from the flag-waving assembly. “And we have.”
