I'm Barack Obama, and I Approve of Howard Dean

Like so many of you, I came to this site in 2003 (or later) after a long run of supporting and campaigning for Howard Dean--indeed, my first donation to Dean went not to his presidential campaign, but to the predecessor exploratory PAC, the Fund for a Healthy America.  Those of you who were around here back then and into and through the waning days of the campaign in early 2004 remember Daily Kos as the largest Dean-friendly blog on the Internets (outside of the ground-breaking Blog for America) where many of us were first introduced to idea of online activism on behalf of a presidential candidate.

Well, how far we have come.  This site jumped from a few thousand to closing in on a couple hundred thousand users, and in turn Markos went from "just a guy with a website" and part-time Dean internet consultant to a regular commentator on the state of Democratic and progressive politics.  

 

And all the while, Howard Dean took the energy created by his presidential campain and whipped it into a national strategy for winning congressional and senate races in states that the Old Guard^® of the Democratic Party said we had no business competing in--or, more to the point--had no business wasting money in.  As part and parcel of this strategy, the successor organization to Dean for America, Democracy for America, was one of the first national political organizations to get behind the senate candidacy of "that tall black guy with the funny name."

So as it appears more certain than ever that Barack Obama is going to do in 2008 what Howard Dean and so many here started together, we should recognize what Howard Dean's vision has led to, and how closely Barack Obama's success is tied to that vision.

The Nation's Ari Berman does just that in a feature length piece now online and to appear in the March 17, 2008, print edition.

We all recall, just shortly after the Blue Wave of November 7, 2006, crashed on the shores of the Republican House and Senate, Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, James Carville, and the rest of the major domos rushed to any pundit, microphone and television camera that reached more than a few dozen people to take credit for one of the more decisive political turn-arounds in recent memeory.  We heard of Emanuel's deftness in hand-picking candidates to run in vulnerable Republican districts, of Chick Schumer's ability to bankroll the senate races of just enough Democratic challengers to eek out a bare Democratic senate majority, and, most decisively of Carville's claim that we undid the GOP in spite of, rather than because of Dean's 50-state stragegy.  Carville was, as is his nature, the most pointed: "It's pretty clear that the committees work and the DNC works, but they don't work together. And now we're getting ready to gear up in a presidential year, and I think Harold Ford would be a great chairman."

Indeed, as Berman points out, even as far back as the run-up to the 2006 election, the move was on to side-step Dean and his bottom-up camapign strategies:

A few months earlier, The New Republic had reported that Clinton's camp was "laying the groundwork to circumvent the DNC in the event that Clinton wins the nomination." This shadow DNC had a number of integral parts: adviser Harold Ickes would develop state-of-the-art technology to help Clinton reach prospective voters; EMILY's List and Clinton's allies in organized labor would launch an unprecedented effort to turn out supporters, especially women voters; former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe would raise untold sums from wealthy donors and the business community; and communications honcho Howard Wolfson would direct an unrelenting war room. Ever since 1992 the Clintons had used the DNC as an outpost for raising money from big donors, and funding candidates had taken precedence over nurturing progressive organizers. That model would continue into '08. Dean could remain at the DNC as a figurehead but only if he stayed in line.

Well, that's history.  Dean fended off all of them, and by this past summer it was Barack Obama and almost entire field of Democratic presidential nominees who would appear at Yearly Kos, and not the DLC's convention held the same weekend.  As a huge exclamation to the fact that the dinosaurs of centrism were losing their hold and that the movement which claims Howard Dean as one of its chief inspirations had seized greater purchase on the future of successful elections, Hillary Clinton, the then-champion of the DLC, herself realized that the DLC was only barely clinging to life and gave a memorable, if not altogether successful appearance at Yearly Kos.  

Clearly, Dean was seen by more than just we of the "freakish curiosity," an appellation affixed to us by the guy who just runs [this] website (Heh.); even the candidates had started to listen.  Berman continues:    

The race for the Democratic nomination is a window into how the candidates view the future of the party, which is being shaped in large part by Dean's efforts. Are Clinton and Obama similarly committed to Dean's fifty-state strategy? How much faith would each, as the Democratic nominee, put in the party's grassroots? In the Internet era, the party is less about elder statesmen sitting in Washington than millions of people across the country organizing locally around issues and candidates. Dean and Obama have understood how the party is changing--and have embraced it. Clinton, thus far, has not.  [Emphasis added.]

For example:

The net effect is Obama's large base of small donors, who are enthusiastic supporters he can tap again and again. Ninety percent of the $28 million he raised online in January, for example, came in donations of $100 or less. Obama has fused a tightknit group of advisers with a mass of ordinary people, creating what Trippi calls "command and control at the top while empowering the bottom to make a difference."

I listened to a symposium on the 2008 primary campaign the other day--yes, they've had one already--and, think what you will about Joe Trippi, but he said a few things that were very interesting.  The first was that compared to what they did in the Dean campaign, itself highly innovative, Obama's campaign tools and fundraising models are, in his words, like comparing the Wright brothers (Dean) versus a Mars landing (Obama); in short, until the next great innovation, all future campaigns will be run like Obama's.

More importantly, however, he said that Hillary Clinton's will be the last of the presidential campaigns ever run the way hers has been.  In so many words, he called it nothing short of a disaster.

Berman agrees with Trippi's analysis:

Yet in a larger sense, Hillary's candidacy represents the polar opposite of what Dean built as a candidate and party chair: her campaign is dominated by an inner circle of top strategists, with little room for grassroots input; it hasn't adapted well to new Internet tools like Facebook and MySpace; it tends to raise big contributions from a small group of high rollers rather than from large numbers of small donors; and it is less inclined to expand the base of the party.  [Emphasis added.]

So, is it any wonder that Obama's campaign so clearly channels the Dean strategies?  Not hardly.  Fresh off the precursor to this current presiential campaign, David Axelrod recognized the potential of the Dean model when serving as a cheif media consultant to Deval Patrick's successful campaign for the Massachusetts governorship.

Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is required reading in a class that Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, teaches at Northwestern University. If the Obama campaign naturally understood what Dean was trying to do, even though Dean's candidacy ultimately fizzled, the Clintons did not. "They looked at '04 and said, If Howard Dean lost, those tools must not have worked," Trippi says. He cites Clinton's unwillingness to compete all-out in red-state caucuses as a main reason her campaign is in such a predicament. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos dubbed Clinton's approach--and subsequent discounting of her losses in red America--the "insult 40 states" strategy.  (Nice, kos. -Ed.) While the Obama campaign prepared for the long haul, Clinton poured most of her resources into a few key early states, expecting to have the nomination wrapped up by Super Tuesday. "It's not a very long run," Clinton predicted in late December. "It'll be over by February 5."

So wrong.  Again.  

Whatever the outcome of this election, for (I suppose) anything can yet happen, it is clear that we have seen the last of the command and contol campaigns and the last of the command and control candidates--at least for a while.  And if, as now expected, Barack Obama does emerge victorious when the results of March 4 primaries are in, he will not only have defeated Hillary Clinton for the nomination, but he will have vanquished her style of politics in the name of Howard Dean.