RUNNING ON INSTINCT.(Howard Dean)

From 2002, Joe Klein on John Kerry

On a sultry Tuesday night last August, Howard Dean stood on a stage in Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan, and faced a crowd of ten thousand. He was nearing the end of his twenty-minute stump speech, an enthusiastically received disparagement of George W. Bush's handling of Iraq, the economy and the budget deficit, the battle against terrorism, the North Korean nuclear threat, global trade, health care, energy policy, the environment, and education--with detours to take swipes at Rush Limbaugh and the religious right. Along the way, Dean offered, by contrast, an accounting of his major accomplishments during his eleven years as governor of Vermont.

At last, he arrived at his peroration, the thematic crux of his campaign for the Presidency: "The biggest lie that people like me tell people like you during the election season is 'If you vote for me, I'll solve all your problems.' The truth is that the power to change this country is in your hands, not mine. Abraham Lincoln said that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. But this President, this President has forgotten ordinary Americans. And you have the power to take this party back and make it stand for something again. You have the power to take this country back."

A lot of Vermonters have a bemused reaction to this sort of oratorical zeal, having received minimal exposure to grandiloquence during Dean's governorship. His annual State of the State addresses, for instance, are remembered as flatly delivered, stick-to-the-text exercises. But Dean's hortative style on the stump--his habit of aiming both index fingers at his listeners and, not unlike an evangelist in the pulpit, bellowing, "You have the power! You have the power!"--is perfectly suited to the Internet-driven populist energy that has given his campaign such dynamism, and it invariably galvanizes audiences.

Above the roar of the Bryant Park crowd, Dean interjected, "Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much, New York City. I love you. I was born here. Thank you."

I was born here. Ten times in four days I had heard the stump speech, and this was Dean's sole autobiographical public utterance--four words, a parenthetical afterthought. The Bryant Park rally culminated the aptly named Sleepless Summer Tour. About thirty campaign workers and supporters, and a comparable contingent of journalists, had been ferried coast to coast to coast--Washington, D.C., to Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest to Texas to Illinois to New York--in a chartered jet with legroom sufficient only for the legless. In midsummer, Dean had appeared simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek, he was raising money (mostly via the Internet) with vastly more ease and success than his competitors, and his once quixotic pursuit of the Presidency--derided by his own mother, in its embryonic phase, as "preposterous, and besides, it's very expensive"--had become stunningly plausible. The size and fervor of the Sleepless Summer Tour crowds--five thousand at midday on a Sunday in Portland, ten thousand later that afternoon in Seattle, a roof-shaking gathering of three thousand the following night in San Antonio--evinced a dexterity of campaign organization and a visceral passion among voters that made it easy to recognize, five months before the first Presidential-primary ballots would be cast, that the Democratic nomination had become Dean's to lose. None of the other aspirants, it seemed, had the resources, the creative instincts, or the rhetorical ferocity to match him. (He was merciless when it came to skewering President Bush, whom he ridiculed variously as "bullheaded," "petulant," and "reckless.")

Yet, as Dean's momentum accelerated, it became clear that something was missing: as the anomalous "I was born here" implied, fundamental questions about the Dean DNA--who was he and what motivated him?--lacked articulated answers. (You were born, yes, and then what?) His principal rivals--John Kerry, Wesley Clark, John Edwards, Richard Gephardt, Joseph Lieberman--all subscribed to the focus-group-tested orthodoxy that an ample measure of ostensibly intimate disclosure was the sine qua non of effective communication with the electorate. So Kerry alluded incessantly to his exploits in Vietnam; Clark spoke of the pride he felt in his military career; Edwards and Gephardt emoted about having been shaped by their fathers' humble livelihoods (textile-mill worker, milk-truck driver); Lieberman's public identity became inseparable from his devout Judaism. Similar faith in the indispensability of soulful, sentimental narrative had worked for the last two Democratic governors to win the White House--a Bible-quoting Georgia peanut farmer and a Svengali from "a place called Hope"--but Dean was having none of it.