(This is the fourth article in a four-part series looking at the candidacy of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who is seeking the Democratic Party nomination for president for the 2004 election. Today: Why the Democrats need Dean.)
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Clinton Democrats who fear the rise of Howard Dean will McGovernize their party anew have the picture exactly back to front. For 35 years, Democrats have been increasingly marginalized in national U.S. politics. Dean is the best long-term hope they have of changing that, even if he loses.
The centrist Democrat nightmare is that Dean, a former governor of Vermont, will re-radicalize their party, repeating the 1972 disaster. Then, not only did Sen. George McGovern go down to catastrophic defeat at the hands of President Richard Nixon, but his party was so marginalized at the national level that it only held the White House for one of the next five presidential terms.
However, three clear, defining principles have vividly emerged about Dean's candidacy, and they are all in the Democrats' long-term interest.
First, Dean stands for financial probity, a balanced budget and a sound currency when the ruling Republicans have thrown those values out the window. As long as money can still be borrowed and overseas investors still enticed, they will continue to get away with it. But that cannot be forever, and may not even be for long. When the day of reckoning comes, it is the Dean-ized Democrats, not the big spending, deficit-happy Republicans who will reap the reaction.
Second, Dean is the only potential presidential candidate the Democrats have who came out loud, clear and early in opposing the war in Iraq, and the more that war slides into costly quagmire, and probably far worse, the more his stock will rise at the expense of all the Democrat straddlers who agonized on the fence, and in contrast to George "Trigger-Happy" Bush, too.
As the death count of U.S. soldiers rises, Bush's May 1 bravura performance in landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier to proclaim the major military operations of the war over will look a lot less macho and a lot more phony. Democratic supporters of the war like "Holy Joe" Lieberman or wafflers like John Kerry will be in no position to cash in on that, but Dean will.
Third, Dean has charisma and he can fire up the white middle-class grass roots. Even Bill Clinton could never do that. This means that a Dean candidacy, even if he loses, could carry the same hope for the Democrats that Al Smith did for them in 1928 and Barry Goldwater did for the Republicans in 1964. He can launch the process of a long-term dramatic shift in national political alignments away from the old, long-dominant party and to the advantage of the long-minority one. Even if Dean cannot win in 2004 -- and it is far too soon to proclaim that he cannot -- he may therefore be the essential ingredient to prepare the way for decisive Democratic victory in 2008.
This assessment, incidentally, gives the lie to the common Conventional Wisdom that a Dean candidacy is the last thing that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and her husband want to see. If Dean wins, that may indeed be the case. But if Dean wins the party's presidential nomination and then goes down to defeat, after revitalizing the party's long dormant grass roots his candidacy could prepare the way for a new, lasting Democratic national coalition, base don the embattled white suburban middle class, just as Al Smith's 1928 campaign brought the previously Republican Southern and Eastern European urban ethnic groups into the Democratic camp and prepared the way for the Franklin Roosevelt landslides of 1932 and 1936.
Above all else, the Dean insurgency may give the Democrats a renewed nationwide legitimacy at the congressional level that will give them the best hope they have had for a decade in regaining control of the House of Representatives with all its fiscal powers.
For almost a quarter of a century, since Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter in 1980, the Democrats congressional strategy has been shaped by cynical old House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts. It was he, who laid down the Conventional Wisdom that "all politics is local."
O'Neill used this mantra to help maintain Democratic control of the House, with its sweeping fiscal powers, during the decade and a half after Reagan seized the commanding heights of the presidency in 1980. And until 1994 it seemed to work. Even if the Democrats got creamed five times out of six in presidential elections over the 20 years from 1968 to 1988, they held on to the House through all that time because their established House majority, with secure control of the key committees, could keep bringing home the bacon and the rest of the pork barrel to their home districts.
But in 1994, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., led the House Republicans out of their long political exile at last, and won the speakership for himself, by trumping this "wisdom." He ran a national, coordinated campaign focusing on the Clinton administration's utterly bungled healthcare reform initiative. Ever since then, Republicans have sought to "nationalize" the every-two-year campaign for all the 435 House seats. And it has continued to work for them. It worked again last November.
Former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, now forlornly running for next year's presidential nomination led the Democrats into last November's congressional midterm elections on Tip's old strategy. It hadn't worked in the four elections before that and it didn't work then either.
Even the coattails of Clinton, the first re-elected Democratic president in 60 years since Roosevelt in 1936, failed to pull in a recovered House majority behind him. Even the popular backlash against the House Republicans for their failed attempt to convict Clinton after impeaching him in 1998 over the Monica Lewinsky scandal failed to get them over the top. And even winning half a million more votes for their presidential candidate in 2000, with another 2 1/2 million going to radical environmental Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 failed to do it.
Like a broken record or a flawed CD, the Democrats kept coming back to their same losers' catch-call, "All politics is local." And it isn't. Not any more. Dean alone among the current crop of Democratic presidential wannabes seems to realize this salient point.
Back on Nov. 16, 2002, we noted in UPI Analysis, "The root cause of the Democrats' dilemma in the post Tip O'Neill era is that they continue to imagine that they can beat something with nothing. And they never have. Only Bill Clinton, who with all his self-indulgent personal flaws, most definitely was 'something' has effectively led them into the corridors of executive power and kept them there over the past generation. And so far, the congressional Democrats have yet to emulate him. Gephardt certainly didn't. Can anyone?"
Nine months after we wrote those lines, we finally have a positive answer to the question we posed back then. Howard Dean offers the Democrats at least a chance at creating a coherent, credible and attractive national vision again, nearly four decades since their last one went up in smoke. Now at long last, the Doctor is In.
