01.26.04

Howard Dean in Plymouth, NH

When rumors about a Dean presidential race first started circulating in Vermont, the conventional wisdom was that he was laying the groundwork for a future political career at the national level, or maybe hoping to secure a vice-presidential slot if his campaign did exceptionally well. I don't think anyone dreamed he might become a front-runner, largely because we thought it was impossible for him to raise the necessary money. So Dean's transformation over the next few months came as a stunning surprise. And it was hard to know what to be more surprised by - the good doctor's unimagined success, or his transformation from a sedate centrist into the standard bearer for what was left of the Democratic party.

With the New Hampshire primary approaching, I thought it was time to see this transformation with my own two eyes, and so I drove to New Hampshire to attend a Howard Dean town meeting in Plymouth. I figured it would be my last chance to see a presidential candidate up close, and find out what had happened to our Dear Leader.

I had vague memories of Dean on the radio during my college years, when he would periodically sit in and take questions on a weekly Vermont affairs call-in show, and like everyone else I had followed along during the divisive debates on civil unions and property taxes. Interestingly enough, though, I had never even known what Dean looked like until the start of the presidential campaign (short! short!), and wasn't sure what to expect from him now, with the media calling him "angry" and a "liberal firebrand".

One day someone will write a monograph about the critical role of school gymnasiums in American political life. Get rid of school gymnasiums and church basements and you destroy the very fabric of the Republic (a vestigial, shadow America will linger on in VFW lodges and the local mall). This particular meeting was held at the indoor gymnasium of Plymouth State College (home of the Panthers!), an oasis of learning about forty miles north of Concord.

Plymouth is known mainly for its large interstate highway, I-93, which provides a convenient way of getting the hell out of Plymouth. With the forecast predicting temperatures of ten to fifteen below zero that night, this is what all reasonable people had done, leaving behind only hypercharged Dean partisans and the enigmatic, furless, tax-hating bipeds indigenous to northern New Hampshire.

I arrived at 6:15 and found a crowd of about forty people already thronged by the entrance (mercifully enough, in a heated hallway). At 6:30, the main building opened and a detachment of Dean volunteers escorted us up to a registration queue, where we were stickered, welcomed, and asked to give our names. I toyed with the idea of becoming indignant abou this, but it occurred to me that I was going to be describing the event on a public website under my real name, so that it would take special effort to work up a real head of indignation at the loss of privacy.

The door to the gym opened onto an enormous American flag suspended from the ceiling, reassuring us that we hadn't walked in on a Canadian provincial election by mistake. The room layout opened every cynical pore in my body - instead of facing the bleachers, the (squat) podium was set up to face a camera platform set up against a blank wall, so that any TV shot of Dean would capture the whole of the crowd in the background. There were a few token rows of chairs squeezed in front of the podium, and I quickly snagged one about twenty feet from the podium, to get a good view. It felt like being a lecture hall where the professor's chair faces the blackboard.

People were streaming in quickly, and the seats around me filled up with a group of high school kids from Connecticut, who had already been to a Kerry and Edwards event and displayed an refreshing level of cynicism about the political process. We all stared across the room into the bleachers, where one woman in a gaggle of orange-jumpsuited attendees had removed her orange jumpsuit to reveal a costume made entirely of silver foil. It was unclear from this distance whether the costume was related to the space program, or just represented a particularly aggressive response to the local weather. The center section of the bleachers seemed to be taken up by union people - grizzled, large men in identical acronym T-shirts. And there was also a sizable sprinkling of granola girls (braids, organic hemp caftan) to remind us we were not far from the Franconia hippie enclave, an island of good vibrations and poorly masked body odor in an otherwise redneck sea. Ah, New Hampshire.

The warm-up act for Howard Dean consisted of a troupe of children, ranging in age from six to sixteen, all of them looking faintly diabolical in their TV makeup. They were here to perform excerpts from "Mail to the Chief", a stage revue compiled from thousands of letters that misguided small children had written to the President of the United States (think Barney as portrayed by Lee Greenwood). To my great dismay, they took it all very seriously - I could see lips moving even among the kids sitting out a song on the bleachers, and those doing the actual performing displayed a creepy, Stanislavsky-grade level of emotional committment.

The performance started with a miked-up twelve year old singing the pledge of allegiance, while her cohorts performed an interpretive dance of allegiance behind her. Everyone on stage was facing Howard Dean, hidden in a distant corner of the room, so we were spared the full impact of the performance. The twelve-year-old girl broke off halfway through the pledge to give a long recitative on the benefits of living in the United States, the comparative superiority of the United States to all other nations, past, present, and future, as well as her fervent hopes that the United States would continue to increase in strength and influence without limit, providing a source of comfort and joy to other nations, a beacon of light in a dark and uncertain world.

This was followed by a song about equality, in which it was proposed that we all deserve a chance to do our best, that everyone can learn to play the violin, and that differences of rich and poor, smart and dull are to be ruthlessly suppressed. "Everyone can learn the violin / and everyone... can.. WIN!", the chorus went, and I couldn't help but think of the old Vysotski* song about ideologically acceptable sports:

We're not afraid of bad news,
Our response is to run in place,
Where even a beginner finishes with the winners.

Beautiful: among the runners,
There are no leaders, and no one is left behind,
Running in place brings everyone together.

* Vysotski - the king of the underground Soviet-era bards, an amalgalm of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Lenny Bruce rolled into one alcoholic package. He died in 1980.

The grand finale of the Mail to the Chief program was a real showstopper. Two pairs of students came out, each holding taut a long, blue silk banner. They began to flap the banners up and down, creating a wave effect, while yet another twelve-year-old with big lungs trilled out "America the Beautiful". While she sang, a teenage boy walked out with a life-size, very realistic stuffed eagle on a stick, and began to slowly make "eagle soaring" motions among the blue waves.

I'm afraid I lost it a little bit at this point (alright, a lot, for a long time). But to Howard Dean's credit, he bore he whole thing like a man, and even managed to thank the fine students with a straight face afterwards.

Dean came out with his wife, who has lately been serving much the same purpose in the Dean campaign as the stuffed eagle on a stick served in the floor show - they wave poor Judy around at every opportunity to inspire the voters, and she seems quite gamely up to it, for someone with such a fierce devotion to privacy. She gave a very short and gracious introduction for her husband, who then pleasantly surprised me by refusing to turn his back to the audience, and then we were off and running.

For a speech two days before the primary, Dean seemed strangely calm and measured. I had been conditioned by the press to see a liberal firebrand, but there instead was our good old Governor, sounding just like he did back in the Vermont radio days - respectful, slightly didactic, low-key. Dean has a nice way of holding a crowd that he must have cultivated in his doctor days - he tells you what the trouble is, explains the symptoms, and leaves you waiting in suspense to hear the perscription. He speaks without notes, and I think almost makes a point to call up lots of policy detail and budget figures without having to look them up. It's a mark of how bad George W. Bush is at extemporaneous speaking that this kind of thing even registers, but all the candidates are smart to make a subtle point of it. At one point in the speech, Dean started listing all of the industrialized countries that have universal health care - "the British, French, Canadians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks..." and got a big laugh from the crowd at the implicit reference to Bush's Grecians.

The most surprising thing about Dean's speech was how closely it seems to have been lifted from John McCain's playbook. During the 2000 campaign, I lived right across the river from New Hampshire, and still have vivid memories of the Republican primary here. I will confess that I developed a great fondness for McCain, who was running his campaign almost entirely on the issue of campaign finance reform. In three debates, McCain completely destroyed George Bush, who seemed to be working hard at not grinning and looking offstage to his handlers, as if to say "hey, get a load of this, I'm in the presidential debate!" McCain stuck to one point - his belief that politics is corrupted by an "iron triangle" of wealthy corporations, lobbyists, and their pet representatives in government. Since he was standing next to a man who had been given his career on a silver platter, and broken all fundraising records with the help of wealthy corporate backers, his point was hard to deny. When the vote finally came, New Hampshire voters seemed to agree, giving McCain a 19 point victory.

McCain's candidacy fizzled after South Carolina, partly because of a dirty tricks campaign and partly because the Republican party establishment was in no mood to change its mind after finding its golden boy. But everyone noticed McCain's immense success in raising money over the Internet - a great deal of it in the form of small individual contributions, the kind that are now funding much of the Dean effort. And when Howard Dean started getting press for his skilled efforts at organizing online, I like everyone else was instantly reminded of the earlier campaign. The feeling grew stronger when I actually saw what Dean looked like - another short, thick-necked man with a mischevious streak. And at the town meeting, it occurred to me that the transformation was complete. Dean was clearly stepping into McCain's track, assuring voters that he was his own man, railing against the corruption of politics by corporate interests, promising to win people their country back.

When Dean was governor of Vermont, he faced three major issues. The best-known of these was the furor over civil unions, which received national attention, and for a time bitterly divided the state. The legislation wasn't passed on Dean's initiative - the Supreme Court ordered the change in the law - nor was Dean an especially vocal proponent of civil unions, before or after (the bill was signed in private). But he did take a stand in support of them, and he signed the bill that passed civil unions into law. It was an ugly time of "TAKE BACK VERMONT" signs in every other yard, a narrow majority opposing the new bill, and promises of an electoral rout to come ("Remember in November!"). But November came, Dean stayed (though the House didn't), and three years later, none of the horrible predictions of civil unions opponents had come true. All Vermont was left with was equal rights and a slight uptick in tourism.

Act 60 was easily as divisive an issue as civil unions, but it took place on the local stage. The Act also had its origins in a court decision. Since schools in Vermont are funded by property taxes, there had long been a massive disparity in budgets between between so-called gold towns (ski areas like Stowe and Killington) and rural towns like Whiting or Orwell. The Supreme Court ruled that this was fundamentally unfair to Vermont students, and ordered the legislature to come up with a more equitable system of school funding. The result was a statewide property tax and the creation of a common fund (the most hated part of the law) that effectively moved money from rich districts to poorer ones. Act 60 was universally reviled by the richer towns in the state, but Dean stood by it and won a re-election campaign despite strong opposition.

The third great issue during Dean's tenure was public health, with a special focus on health insurance. This one was a Dean initiative all the way - his background as a medical doctor made him especially passionate about getting people insured - and he got results to be proud of. In Vermont, you can get health insurance on a dishwasher's salary, which is unheard of in other parts of the country. If you have children, you can get insurance for them at token cost. If you need perscription drugs, you can join an organized trip to buy them at a fractional price up in Canada. And as a resident, you benefit from the Dean-era focus on children's welfare. Teen pregnancies are down 49%, child abuse is down 45%, child sexual abuse is down over 70%. Young people in the state are materially better off thanks to those policies.

Vermont has an interesting political make up, in that there is an island of Progressives in Chittenden county, the most urban and populous part of the state, and a mixed bag of Democrats, independents and rock-ribbed Republicans in other parts of the state. In the 2000 election, Vermonters elected both a socialist (Bernie Sanders) and a Republican (Jim Jeffords) to Congress, both with huge majorities. Dean consistently placed himself in the middle of this wide spectrum, frequently angering supporters on the left and right with his Clintonian triangulation. At the time, I found this centrist dance a little too calculating, and I was angry to see Dean accept large campaign contributions. In the 2000 gubernatorial election, I voted for Anthony Pollina, a candidate with much purer environmental and campaign finance credentials, and felt all clean and pure myself. But I can't say I was sorry to see Dean win.

Having now sat through three years of the Bush restoration, including the ignoble meltdown of the Democratic party in 2002, I have to say that a talent for practical politics and a certain level of shrewdness are starting to look mighty attractive to me. The Howard Dean I saw in Plymouth is principled, consistent, but also smart enough to wage the kind of presidential campaign that could unseat Bush. His views, which he has done a good job of drawing attention away from, continue to be very moderate. And I can't help but be impressed that he spoke against the Iraq war when no one else dared to do it. He was a good governor for Vermont, and I wouldn't mind another four years of his leadership.

Thinking all that through on the long drive home, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and make a donation to the Dean campaign, whatever the New Hampshire result turns out to be. I don't know quite how a sense of optimism has managed to overcome my powerful miserliness and cynicism, but somehow it happened. I am sure it had to do with the stuffed eagle.

The Rutland Herald has an excellent archive of articles on Howard Dean, worth exploring if you are curious about the candidate. The Herald may be a small-city paper, but it's got a Pulitzer under its belt, and its coverage of Dean is far more penetrating and interesting than anything you'll find on a weblog.

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