01-03-2004
Campaign 2004 - The Doc's Successful Operation
James A. Barnes
Even before a single vote has been cast, a once-obscure
physician-turned-governor is the undeniable winner of the first
and perhaps the most critical contest of the battle for the 2004
Democratic presidential nomination: the "invisible primary."
That's no small feat for Howard Dean, a former five-term chief
executive of Vermont, because the White House hopeful who is
able to triumph in the "invisible" preseason chase for
contributions, endorsements, and the aura of success usually
prevails, once the real games -- the primaries and caucuses --
begin.
Dean has cultivated such a solid-gold grassroots fundraising
network that he became the first Democratic candidate in history
to opt out of the public financing system for the primaries and
forgo millions of dollars in federal matching funds. Although
he's still not the darling of his party's establishment, Dean
has snagged some key endorsements. And to party insiders and the
press corps, Dean has the scent of a winner -- at least in his
quest for the Democratic crown.
"The weight of opinion now is that Dean has virtually locked
up the nomination," said veteran Democratic presidential
operative Harold Ickes, who is organizing an effort to raise $95
million for an independent media campaign to boost whoever
emerges as the Democratic standard-bearer. "Everyone hedges that
he could knock himself out, but there's a growing opinion among
people I run into -- it's almost a sigh of resignation -- that
it certainly looks as if he's going to get it."
The assessment that Dean's nomination is virtually inevitable
is based on several factors: He has energized a significant
segment of the Democratic base as well as new voters. He has won
the money primary, hands down. And he is the only one of the
nine Democratic candidates with a realistic shot at capturing
both the kickoff Iowa caucuses on January 19 and New Hampshire's
first-in-the-nation primary on January 27.
Well aware of the danger of losing the "expectations" game,
Dean pollster Paul Maslin cautions, "We've got to close the
sale, and there are going to be bumps on the road -- there
always are." But he also likens the accomplishments of his
candidate over the past year to the prelude to the improbable
victory of the 1976 Democratic nominee. "Even Jimmy Carter never
achieved the multidimensional success that Howard Dean has
gained," Maslin said.
Indeed, the pre-Iowa case for the former Vermont governor's
likely nomination appears more solid today than the former
Georgia governor's was after he won Iowa and New Hampshire.
Tapping the Base
It's not unusual for a front-runner to seem poised to capture
a presidential nomination before a single ballot has been cast.
At this point in 2000, George W. Bush and Al Gore were solid
favorites, because each had broad support from the elected
officials, major fundraisers, and interest-group leaders who
constituted his party's establishment.
What's unusual about this election cycle's invisible primary,
observed Democratic media consultant Anita Dunn, is that "the
person who is steamrolling his way to inevitability before the
first vote is cast is a person that the [Democratic]
establishment doesn't support."
Although -- or, perhaps, to some degree because -- he's not
the Washington establishment's boy, Dean has managed to tap into
the deep vein of disdain that many rank-and-file Democrats,
particularly liberals, have toward President Bush. Many of these
partisans blame their party's dismal showing in the 2002 midterm
elections on their congressional leaders' reluctance to
seriously challenge Bush on taxes, Iraq, or much of anything.
Unlike the rest of the chief contenders for the Democratic
nomination, Dean signaled early on that he would confront both
Bush and the sense of drift in his own party. He blasted the
president on the war and his fellow Democrats for voting for it.
And as Dean recently told The Des Moines Register, he always
gets a "huge cheer" for the line in his stump speech that says,
"As I've gone around the country, I find Democrats are almost as
angry with the Democrats in Washington as they are at the
Republicans."
In a way, all of Dean's main rivals began running for the
nomination with an eye toward winning the general election. Dean
was content to run one race at a time.
"The party was looking for a voice. And whoever provided that
voice was going to be a bigger beneficiary, earlier, in all
kinds of ways," Maslin said.
Dean has successfully used the Internet to supercharge the
enthusiasm that his outsider campaign has generated among
disaffected Democrats. His aggressive, tech-savvy campaign has
sown a remarkable grassroots network of supporters through its
Web site and blogs, where the physician's self-appointed
boosters share information, ideas, and a sense of empowerment.
That interactive network has helped Dean's paid staff turn out
thousands of people for rallies and recruit thousands of
volunteers to work in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other
battleground states.
But the Internet's most important contribution to Dean's
campaign is financial. Already, he has raised more than $25
million, much of which came in the form of small donations over
the Internet. When the books for the last quarter of 2003 are
closed, many observers expect Dean to have raised some $40
million for the year, dwarfing his rivals' war chests.
And the Dean money machine seems to be a renewable resource:
Many of his small donors are giving again and again. In
December, the Dean camp raised $400,000 in just four days to
counter an independent anti-Dean ad campaign run by unions
backing Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, and $500,000 in another
four days to "thank Al Gore" for his endorsement.
"The hardest thing in politics is to get people to feel like
they are committed and involved," said former Rep. Tony Coelho
of California, who chaired Gore's drive for the 2000 nomination.
The Dean campaign has "done that through the Internet
wonderfully."
But the Vermonter's success has involved shoe leather as much
as computer pixels. Because Dean did not seek re-election in
2002, he was able to devote considerable time and attention to
the traditional courtship rituals and personal campaigning that
party activists in Iowa and New Hampshire seem to demand. Even
before he left the Vermont Statehouse, he had planted his flag
in living rooms all across the neighboring Granite State.
And while the Democrats' 2003 invisible primary didn't
produce many outright casualties, Dean's early success in
rallying the anti-war wing of the party was a deathblow to the
prospects of Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who entered the race
late and exited early when his own anti-war cries failed to
attract crowds.
Graham was the only establishment Democrat in the field who
had voted against the congressional resolution that authorized
Bush to attack Iraq. That stand, plus his status as a former
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, could
have made Graham attractive to anti-war Democrats. But by the
time Graham began actively campaigning in late spring, Dean had
already won their hearts.
"What killed Graham was that the base that he would have been
the best messenger for was already spoken for," said Steve
Jarding, a senior adviser to Graham's campaign.
Winning Expectations
If Dean does win the nomination, it will in large part be
because he's managed to position himself to take full advantage
of 2004's front-loaded political calendar. After the Democratic
National Committee changed its rules, a great many states pushed
up their primaries to February. As a result, a whopping 17
states and the District of Columbia are slated to hold
delegate-selection events next month.
The race still begins in Iowa and moves to New Hampshire, but
now only a week separates the Granite State -- where polls
indicate Dean holds a big lead -- from the seven states that
vote on February 3.
"If Dean comes in second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire,
he's on track," said former DNC Chairman Don Fowler, who
predicts that if Dean wins the first two states, the ball game
is over.
The scant seven days between New Hampshire and the February 3
events means that the candidate who emerges from New Hampshire
as Dean's principal challenger will not have much time to try to
coalesce the rest of the party around a stop-Dean movement.
Dean is riding a tsunami-sized expectations wave, which is
tricky to stay atop but is even harder to swim against, as his
rivals well know. "The growing presumption [that Dean will be
the nominee] is self-fulfilling in terms of the other
candidates' ability to raise money and generate excitement,"
said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.
In the past, after presidential hopefuls fared poorly in Iowa
and New Hampshire, their financial support dried up, forcing
them to quit the race. But in the telescopic world of the
invisible primary, where distant events loom large, just the
perception that a candidate is going to do badly in a key early
contest can be enough to turn off the flow of dollars.
That seems to have happened to Sen. John Kerry of
Massachusetts, who initially had been expected to win in
neighboring New Hampshire -- a must-win state for him. According
to a Democrat familiar with the Kerry campaign, Kerry's
fundraising, which had exceeded his rivals' through the first
half of 2003, slowed to a trickle as soon as Dean surged in New
Hampshire polling.
"The money just stopped," said the Democrat, after a survey
of likely New Hampshire primary voters conducted in late August
by independent pollster John Zogby showed Dean favored by 38
percent to Kerry's 17 percent. "Back in March, the people
raising money for John were picking out their ambassadorships.
After that [poll], when you think your guy is turning into a
loser, people stop working as hard."
The Massachusetts senator is so far behind Dean in New
Hampshire that his campaign's fate now may rest with the
caucus-goers of Iowa, where Kerry hopes a better-than-expected
showing might put him back into contention in New Hampshire.
Dean, meanwhile, doesn't have to rely on the enthusiasm of
fickle fundraisers adept at collecting cash for candidates who
appear to be a good bet. While the big-checkbook Democrats might
eventually close ranks behind an alternative to Dean, they will
never be able to choke off his funds, because so much of his
money comes from small givers.
The former Vermont governor is also beating the expectation
that, as someone who's never worked in Washington, he wouldn't
be able to win the endorsements game. He is, in fact, winning,
by playing Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside.
Dean largely stayed outside the Beltway to win his first
major endorsement, the backing of the Service Employees
International Union. When Democratic candidates sought guidance
on how they could win the endorsement of the largest union in
the AFL-CIO, Gina Glantz, who was assistant to SEIU President
Andy Stern for strategic issues and political action, handed
them a list of the union's 62 executive board members. She
advised the candidates to reach out to those members.
And Dean apparently followed that advice more energetically
than his opponents.
"It's not to say that others didn't do that, but nowhere to
the extent that he did," said Glantz, now a senior adviser to
Dean. "They were much more reliant on dealing with the
international leadership.... Dean took the union campaign to the
grassroots, just as he had taken the presidential campaign to
the grassroots."
Right after SEIU signaled that it was going to endorse Dean,
Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State,
County, and Municipal Employees, swung his union's considerable
political weight behind Dean. According to McEntee, the Dean
campaign's infrastructure and persistence impressed his members.
When AFSCME operatives visited the Dean headquarters, "they were
blown away" by the energy there, the union chief told National
Journal. AFSCME took a look at Kerry and retired Army Gen.
Wesley Clark, McEntee said, but "Dean kept coming on, and coming
on strong, and gave us every appearance of not only being able
to win the primaries, which he has seemingly demonstrated, but
being able to go up against Bush."
The dividends that these endorsements can pay in the early
contests can hardly be overstated. Beside his phone, McEntee has
a call sheet with the names of dozens of AFSCME local presidents
scattered throughout Iowa, where his union has more than 28,000
members. He makes at least four calls a day to his local AFSCME
chieftains to check on his union's $1 million-plus campaign to
boost Dean's candidacy in Iowa. McEntee said that AFSCME is
"prepared to spend what it takes. It's called boots on the
ground, blood, and treasure."
In Washington, Dean has received a steady stream of
endorsements from House Democrats. But last month's high point
for his campaign, of course, was Gore's declaration that he,
too, supports Dean. Gore's decision, which took the press and
Dean's rivals by surprise, seemed to kick Dean's already
powerful campaign into a higher gear. "I think Gore's
endorsement really made things move fast," said veteran
Democratic operative Marcia Hale, who is advising Dean. "When
those pictures [of Gore endorsing Dean] ran on the news, that
made a difference and really sped things up."
And Gore's blessing certainly caused Dean's rivals to step up
their attacks. "Gore basically forced them into realizing the
race was over unless they did something," Coelho said.
With language usually heard after at least a few votes have
been cast, Gore encouraged Democrats to unite behind the man he
sees as the party's next standard-bearer. "We don't have the
luxury of fighting among ourselves," said Gore at the Harlem
rally where he announced his endorsement. And at a Dean campaign
event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gore urged Democrats to "close
ranks as soon as we can behind a nominee."
Gore's attempt to close the contest down annoyed some
Democrats. An exasperated Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., told
reporters as he endorsed Gephardt, "There has not been a single
vote cast in a primary yet. We ought to allow room for that
pursuit to take place. This thing to try and discourage people
from running at this particular juncture six weeks before a vote
is case is beyond me."
While Dean mastered the Internet, debates on the other medium
that marked this year's invisible primary -- television --
seemed to have little impact on his campaign. Party-sanctioned
encounters broadcast on cable television could have been crucial
to Dean's transformation from a little-known figure on the
national stage to front-runner for his party's presidential
nomination. Instead, the debates were a sideshow that Dean
managed to survive.
The problem with the debates is the same one Dean's rivals
face in trying to overtake him -- the stage is too crowded to
emerge from. Ironically, many of the favorable post-debate
reviews went to the three candidates who never had any real
chance of winning the nomination: former Sen. Carol Moseley
Braun of Illinois, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, and the Rev. Al
Sharpton of New York. Their pluck, tenacity, and wit won them
applause. Such accolades might have helped to refurbish their
images but didn't transform them into significant players.
"Debates can fall into a category of 'too much of a good
thing,' and they certainly did this time," observed Democratic
media consultant Bill Carrick, who advises the Gephardt
campaign.
"I frankly think my colleagues want this [field of
candidates] to narrow quickly, and the debates have been
counterproductive," said Rep. Robert Matsui of California,
chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
"I'm even hearing it from donors [that] it's like we're a 'Tower
of Babble.'"
The widespread sense that the field is way too large puts
pressure on struggling candidates to drop out soon. Yet early
victories by Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire might not produce
the enormous momentum that Gary Hart rode in 1984 after his
upset victory in New Hampshire over Walter Mondale. That's
because, unlike Hart, who seemingly came out of nowhere, Dean is
now established as the front-runner. "I'm not sure that [Dean]
gets the same surge from Iowa and New Hampshire," said pollster
Greenberg. "He'll have momentum, but not the same kind of rush
as someone like Hart."
Candidates who don't finish closely behind Dean will be
hard-pressed to stay in the race, because their campaigns will
naturally begin to shrink as contributions dry up.
A Rush to Judgment
While the Democratic presidential hopefuls have waged
full-fledged campaigns during the past year, few of the party's
rank-and-file voters have been paying much attention. A December
survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
found that only 20 percent of Democrats were following the
nominating contest "very closely." That percentage resembles
what similarly timed polls have found about past presidential
campaigns.
Likewise, the Democratic front-runner is still an enigma to
most of his party. A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted
from December 18 to 21 found that 55 percent of the Democrats
surveyed felt they knew "hardly anything" or "nothing" about
Dean's experience and leadership abilities. Only 14 percent said
they knew a "great deal" or a "good amount" about them. Those
percentages were roughly the same when the Post/ABC pollsters
asked Democrats what they felt they knew about Dean's stands on
issues.
The detachment of most regular Democrats from the invisible
primary is but one reason why some observers worry about that
precursor period's ability to speed up the race and decide the
party's standard-bearer. "It's a lot harder to define yourself
after you win the prize," said Democratic Leadership Council
President Bruce Reed, who was the issues director for Bill
Clinton's 1992 campaign. "You are defined by the primary
contests and introduced to the public by how you win them and on
what terms."
Some Democrats add that a nominee doesn't gain the kind of
experience and seasoning in the invisible primary that the
give-and-take of the real primaries traditionally has provided.
"There certainly is a testing process that is going on right
now, but does it work the same way? I don't think it does," said
Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who was executive director of the Hunt
Commission, which revised the party's presidential nominating
rules in 1981. "It's inordinately concentrated in Iowa and New
Hampshire and national media coverage. And it's a
less-than-conclusive process until somebody starts actually
winning some votes."
But the pregame warm-up very likely will dictate the outcome
of the actual 2004 nominating contest. "We're willing to believe
the invisible primary will roll over the first primaries and
wrap it up," said University of Wisconsin political scientist
Byron Shafer, an expert on the presidential nominating process.
And that prospect has some Democrats worried about what could
happen in the fall campaign. "There is always a danger that the
invisible primary has such an impact that it produces a fait
accompli that voters don't like, and that's a real danger when
you're taking on an incumbent president," added Gephardt adviser
Carrick. Shuddering at the Democratic debacles when the party
challenged sitting GOP presidents in 1972 and 1984, Carrick
added, "The incumbent president has more capacity to pick up the
disaffected voters of the other party who don't like their
nominee."
Texas DNC committeeman Bob Slagle sighed, "Act in haste and
repent in leisure -- that may be exactly where we're going."
Democratic Presidential Nominating Calendar
State Date Delegates Method
Pledged Unpledged*
Iowa 1/19 45 11 caucus/convention
New Hampshire 1/27 22 5 primary
Arizona 2/3 55 9 primary
Delaware 2/3 15 8 primary
Missouri 2/3 74 14 primary
New Mexico 2/3 26 11 party-run primary
North Dakota 2/3 14 8 caucus/convention
Oklahoma 2/3 40 7 primary
South Carolina 2/3 45 10 party-run primary
Dems. Abroad 2/6-9 7 2 caucus/convention
Michigan 2/7 128 26 party-run primary
Washington 2/7 76 19 caucus/convention
Maine 2/8 24 11 caucus/convention
Tennessee 2/10 69 16 primary
Virginia 2/10 82 14 primary
D.C. 2/14 16 23 caucus/convention
Nevada 2/14 24 8 caucus/convention
Wisconsin 2/17 72 15 primary
Hawaii 2/24 20 9 caucus/convention
Idaho 2/24 18 5 caucus/convention
Utah 2/24 23 6 party-run primary
California 3/2 370 70 primary
Connecticut 3/2 49 13 primary
Georgia 3/2 86 16 primary
Maryland 3/2 69 30 primary
Massachusetts 3/2 93 28 primary
Minnesota 3/2 72 14 caucus/convention
New York 3/2 236 49 primary
Ohio 3/2 140 19 primary
Rhode Island 3/2 21 11 primary
Vermont 3/2 15 7 primary
Am. Samoa 3/8 3 3 caucus/convention
Florida 3/9 177 24 primary
Louisiana 3/9 60 12 primary
Mississippi 3/9 33 8 primary
Texas 3/9 195 38 primary/caucus
Kansas 3/13 33 8 caucus/convention
Illinois 3/16 156 30 primary
Alaska 3/20 13 5 caucus/convention
Guam 3/20 3 2 caucus/convention
Wyoming 3/20 13 6 caucus/convention
Colorado 4/13 53 11 caucus/convention
Virgin Islands 4/17 3 3 caucus/convention
Pennsylvania 4/27 151 27 primary
Indiana 5/4 67 14 primary
North Carolina 5/4 90 17 primary
Nebraska 5/11 24 7 primary
West Virginia 5/11 28 11 primary
Arkansas 5/18 36 11 primary
Kentucky 5/18 49 7 primary
Oregon 5/18 46 12 primary
Alabama 6/1 54 8 primary
South Dakota 6/1 14 7 primary
Puerto Rico 6/6 51 7 caucus/convention
Montana 6/8 15 6 primary
New Jersey 6/8 107 22 primary
Unassigned 2
* Nearly all of the unpledged delegates will be certified
by the Democratic National Committee by March 1. They are
not selected on the same day that pledged delegates are
allocated. Date could change slightly. Two unpledged
delegates remain unassigned to a specific state because
of vacancies on the Democratic National Committee.
Source: Democratic National Committee
Barely Watching
In December, most Democrats still weren't paying much
attention to their party's presidential contest, even though
Dean apparently had it nearly wrapped up.
News Stories Followed Percentage of
"Very Closely" Democrats
Early outbreaks of the flu and a 46.5%
national shortage of flu vaccine
Current situation in Iraq 43.0
Capture of Saddam Hussein 40.8
Condition of the U.S. economy 32.1
Medicare reform legislation 30.0
recently signed into law
Race for the Democratic 20.0
presidential nomination
Supreme Court decision upholding 10.2
campaign finance reform legislation
SOURCE: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
National Journal
