Dean's Role Is Redefined by Gore's Endorsement 2 hours, 56 minutes
ago
By R. W. APPLE Jr. The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 Al Gore's endorsement confirms the status of Howard
Dean as that rarest of animals in the jungle of presidential
nominating politics: an insurgent front-runner. It gives him the
legitimacy he has been seeking, but it also presents him with problems
of self-definition.
By now, Dr. Dean had hoped to be in position to pick up the pieces if
the Establishment candidates, as he used to call them, fell back.
Instead, it is they who are revamping their campaigns to be ready to
pounce if he falters in Iowa or New Hampshire, the first two tests in
the race for the top spot on the Democratic ticket next year.
The Gore-Dean partnership was introduced on Tuesday in twin
appearances in Harlem and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "I have come to the
conclusion that among all of the candidates," Mr. Gore declared to a
crowd in Iowa, "Howard Dean and you have managed to do a better job of
igniting enthusiasm at the grass roots all across the United States of
America."
But contradictions will trail Dr. Dean as he jets around the country
with just six weeks left before the first big test. Is he an outsider
still, or is he an insider? On tour last weekend, he sometimes sounded
like both in the same day. Now he is the anointed candidate of the
vice president in an administration whose policies, he has been
suggesting for months, helped to turn many Dean supporters into
nonvoters.
"I was surprised," said the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle,
another Establishment figure who thought of running for president in
2004. "There's no doubt that this is a major prize. I think that it
probably does lend additional credence to the fact that Governor Dean
would be considered by many to be the front-runner today."
It is almost as if the dovish Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, the
insurgent hero of 1968, had been endorsed by the hawkish Harry S.
Truman flattering, of course; politically useful, surely;
ideologically confusing, probably.
As more and more voters learn about Dr. Dean, they will inevitably ask
who he is, what he believes and what events have shaped his views and
character. Is he a liberal, as his passionate young supporters
believe, and as his relentless criticism of the war in Iraq implies,
who can flank primary opponents to the left? Or is he more of a
centrist, as he said in the South over the weekend, who can appeal to
general-election voting blocs that have seemed highly antagonistic to
each other? What to make of his record in Vermont, where he combined
liberalism on abortion with conservatism on gun control?
How well Dr. Dean wears will depend on the answers, not only in the
struggle for the nomination, but even more, if he gets it, in the
contest with President Bush next fall.
Such questions arise for all presidential hopefuls, but usually
farther down the road. For Dr. Dean, a former governor of a small,
out-of-the-way state who has less experience on the national or
international stage than any other important major-party candidate in
memory less even than Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton they have come so
fast, in a campaign season with a compressed primary schedule, that he
has had inadequate time to answer them in a measured manner.
Meantime, his campaign shows signs of logistical strain that can only
get worse as he tries to cope with the demands of reporters and
politicians who want a piece of a candidate who now looks like a
long-distance runner.
Once proud of being on time everywhere, Dr. Dean was late at most
stops last weekend, only partly because of the snow in Iowa. His
entourage went without enough work space and sometimes without food
and drink. A car built to do 35 miles an hour, the 2004 Dean-mobile
tends to wheeze a bit at 90.
But the logistical problems can be fixed relatively easily. What will
be much harder is giving the nation a clear picture of the candidate.
Like Jimmy Carter, who began many of his speeches in Iowa in 1975 and
early 1976 with the comment, "I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not from
Washington," Dr. Dean said in South Carolina, as he has elsewhere,
"We're not like the rest of these Washington campaigns."
It will be harder to say that now. Endorsements are an insider's game.
Yet Dr. Dean, trailing in the fight for black votes in South
Carolina's potentially significant Feb. 3 primary, sought and welcomed
the endorsement of Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. of Illinois,
who flew to the state to issue it, reminding voters there that he was
born in Greenville, S.C.
Dr. Dean's campaign runs in substantial part on union manpower. In
Florida, union members not the political neophytes Dr. Dean often
speaks of drove the vehicles in his motorcades, filled out his crowds
and waved his placards.
But he has also built a 21st-century version of the student army that
helped propel the presidential candidacy of Mr. McCarthy, and now as
then, one of the main elements in attracting young people has been
opposition to an unpopular or at least highly controversial war. At a
pancake breakfast at Drake University in Des Moines last Saturday
morning, he told students that he understood that most of them were
politically passive mainly because they saw no differences between
candidates a situation he vowed to change.
When Dr. Dean himself was a Yale undergraduate in 1968, with Mr.
McCarthy denouncing the Vietnam War and President Lyndon B. Johnson
defending it, he remained politically inactive, even though
Connecticut was a hotbed of antiwar activity, with Joseph I.
Lieberman, then a recent law school graduate and now a rival
presidential candidate, and the actor Paul Newman among the insurgent
leaders.
Despite the obvious parallels between his campaign and Mr. McCarthy's,
the two men could hardly be less alike. There is nothing of the
detached, above-it-all philosopher in Dr. Dean.
In some ways, though, he resembles Robert F. Kennedy, especially when
he uses one of Mr. Kennedy's campaign catch-phrases, "We can do
better." (Mr. Kennedy, a Massachusetts native who represented New York
in the Senate, said it with a Boston accent. Dr. Dean, born in New
York, but a resident of Vermont for most of his adult life, says it
with a New Yorker's inflection. At least to one longtime political
reporter, he sounds like Joseph A. Califano Jr., the antitobacco
crusader, who was a cabinet member under President Carter.)
On the stump, Dr. Dean speaks with great fluency and a self-confidence
that can verge on smugness, seldom searching for a word, stumbling
over syntax or admitting that he lacks a ready answer. Except for
set-piece speeches, he ignores the podiums set up for him, works with
a hand mike and employs a conversational tone, sometimes dropping his
voice at the end of a sentence instead of raising it, all of which
lends intimacy to his words.
At moments like that, Dr. Dean could be a professor leading a seminar,
except that so many of his words are hot. He denounces "the brainless
people in Washington" and repeatedly calls Mr. Bush "this guy" in a
derisory tone. He told one Iowa gathering that Mr. Bush "doesn't
understand anything about defense he's all hat and no cattle, as they
say in Texas," and asked another group, "What are these people in the
White House smoking?"
Pugnacious as a bantam rooster he may well be, as some of his critics
charge, but he rejects the idea that he is angry. At a news conference
in Florida, he insisted, "Our campaign is not about anger, it's about
hope and empowerment." As if to drive home the point, he assumes a new
persona when he comes to the end of his stump speech, shouting, "You
have the power!" over and over again while pointing to the various
sections of his audience.
Slight and compact, with close-cropped hair, almost never without a
tie (although he often takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeves),
Dr. Dean looks every bit the son of privilege, educated at elite
primary and secondary schools and at Yale, that he is. When he uses
words like "amalgam" and "contretemps," the contrast with the
president, another Yale man, is inescapable.
In informal situations, making small talk with potential supporters,
he sometimes seems more to the manor than to the political manner
born. Not that he is either stuffy or tense, just buttoned-up. He has
none of the effusive folksiness of Nelson A. Rockefeller, who grew up
in similar social and economic circumstances but greeted strangers
with a jaunty "Hiya, fella!"
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nyt/20031210/ts_nyt/deansroleisredefinedbygoresendorsement
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"In fact, Gen Clark got off lightly in Thursday afternoon's exchange
of views. Luckily for him, the debate quickly turned into a squabble
over Democratic credentials between the leading radical, Howard Dean -
the former Vermont governor - and the party stalwarts from Congress,
***** Gephardt and John Kerry."
Clark dodges skirmishes during first week in Democrat front line
Former general emerges as the favourite to take on Bush
The Guardian
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday September 27, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1050721,00.html
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