Hunting The Muse

Dean's Race

I haven't written about Dean in a few days because I've been pretty down in the dumps about it all.

If Dean turns it around from this point, it will definitely be a bigger turnaround and transformation than what happened with Kerry's resurgence. It'll be one of the most amazing political stories I can imagine, and I'd be fully behind it. That said, I think that for Dean to win the nomination, it would require something just that amazing.

While a post-mortem isn't exactly appropriate yet since he hasn't dropped out, I do think it's appropriate to think about what has happened that has gotten him to this point, and what was missing to get him further.

I'm referring to some things in past tense not to declare Dean's campaign over, but to emphasize what sort of change is needed to turn things around.

First, the level of Dean's support early on was illusory. I do believe that. The combination of Bush's infuriating behavior and the internet's ability to act as a megaphone for activist behavior served to create a lot of momentum for the activists. It's like that cliche movie scene where you have the complacent enemy standing around bored, and then all of a sudden they hear angry howling, and they see huge menacing shadows on the wall from an advancing enemy... they start to run, and then the enemy turns the corner and there's like three of them. The enemy turns around and mows them down.

Obviously Dean has more than three supporters. But the point is that it's still one person, one vote, and Dean's activist minority didn't have a chance against the complacent majority.

The main problem was with Dean's marketing. They had an awesome marketing strategy to reach the activist grassroots. But it wasn't a dual-purpose strategy; it didn't work very well in reaching the rest. You can almost compare it to Sales - it's like a salesperson resting their reputation on their conversion history rather than their conversion rate. While Dean had done a great job building up early support, he didn't actually have a very good strategy for converting the next very large chunks of voters, who were very different kinds of citizens.

There was of course a ton of things that hurt him that weren't the campaign's fault. Gephardt's murder-suicide act in Iowa (which, I didn't realize, was explicitly admitted by Gephardt's campaign after the fact). The press's freakout in trying to make up for their early lack of Dean examination by running with stories like the Canada talk show and that bizarre time-traveling wife-beating trooper story. The press's coverage of Dean's cheer after the Iowa loss. But in my mind this all served to pile on to a weakness that was already there. I believe that if he had taken steps to shore up that weakness, the other things, while damaging, would not have killed him in the first few states.

The thing is, that weakness is still there. He still hasn't figured out how to turn around the undecided voters. His problem is (and I have to swallow hard to say this), his message still comes across to the layman as basically negative.

In short, he's professing change, but he's focusing on what to change from, not what to change to.

I know this can be argued, but Dean saying that it's a campaign based on hope sounds good, but it's not enough. A Deaniac talking about all the hope they feel is great, but it doesn't seal the deal. The reason is because this kind of hope is amorphous. Most of us Dean followers felt hope about him for our own personal reasons - in my case because I liked how the campaign wasn't top-down, and I judged he'd run the country the same way. But my conclusion there was based off of my own past experience with the Dean campaign, not because of any explicit promise that Dean made about his future administration. The most that I've found he said about that was "I don't see why not," when asked about whether the blog would continue.

Dean is still drawing distinctions against Kerry by pointing out Kerry's bad points rather than explicitly pointing out what he'll do in contrast as President (well, maybe he is, but it's not exactly being aggressively marketed).

So to me, his campaign was missing one basic thing, and I think that if he had offered it, it could have made a huge difference:

Dean needed to market a plan. A comprehensive, thematic system that would allow people to visualize how the country would actually be different under his administration.

I'm really frustrated that he hasn't done this, because it has a history of working. The New Deal. Gingrich's Contract For America. People like it when there's something they can get behind that is more than just the candidate. Dean's always had a credibility problem in that he just seemed too small somehow by himself - the insurgent from Vermont. You combat that by making the campaign be about more than the candidate. He did that, but by clinging to intangible ideals and the momentum of passion. It's ephemeral, it had to dissolve sometime. It might have been different had he marketed a tangible plan for America, where the distinctions from the other candidates would be obvious and he could run on the positivity of the plan.

I hope that after he loses Wisconsin, he goes back to Burlington and comes up with something like this to publish and distribute to everyone in America. It might be the one thing that could give him one last shot.

Posted by Curt at February 14, 2004 03:51 PM