Title Card & Introduction
ALL THE WAY TO WASHINGTON: Howard Dean and the Fight to Take Back America
On this day, 20 years ago, former Governor Howard Dean of Vermont let out a loud cry in an Iowa concession speech. This is where the story starts and ends for most people. The “I have a scream” speech, it was called at the time. The Dean scream, it is called now. A scream so bad that it ended a political career, crashed a frontrunner’s prospects. And there’s truth to that, absolutely—but more than that, it makes a good story. I am sure, as I post this, there is already a few headlines titled “The Dean Scream, 20 years later.” Then again, there may not—a ten-year anniversary is more important than a twenty-year, after all. What would Howard Dean say now, twenty years later, that he didn’t ten years before?
2004 is a flyover election, like 1996 before it. (Not even is it worthy of the hall of fame of ‘84 or ‘72, those remarkable landslides.) We think about 2004 for its brief points of interest—in the modern day, that mostly means the attempt by a contingent of left-wing Democrats to challenge Ohio’s results in the Electoral College. Largely, though, if we think about it (which we do not), we think about it as a foregone conclusion. The post-September 11 fervor too rabid, the War in Iraq still held in good standing, the Bush Administration still too respected. But that’s not true, necessarily. 2004 was decided by razor-thin margins and oddball coalitions. (West Virginia was just as likely to vote for Kerry as Hawaii was to vote for Bush—which, I suppose, is technically true for Democrats and Republicans today but the polling at the time suggested both were equally viable for those parties.)
My fascination with 2004 first was guided along by a free PDF I unearthed of journalist Walter Shapiro’s One-Car Caravan, an homage to the genre-defining What It Takes, about the 1988 election. What Cramer took six years of research to do, Shapiro did in a year—for a reason. Shapiro wanted his book to inform Democratic voters as to who the contenders were, what they stood for, and how trustworthy they were behind closed doors. Without Shapiro’s occasionally dated but always interesting account, this work would not exist. Howard Dean wasn’t my first pick for a speculative deep-dive, instead my first trek was the decidedly more easy path of John Kerry winning instead. It was going to be called Kerry’s Choice—after the New York Post gaffe of the same name—in which Kerry stuck with his gut and chose House Leader Dick Gephardt to serve as his running mate. I tried to replicate the style of @Vidal ’s Maelstrom, an epistolary story mixing together headlines, articles, and fictional memoirs to create a single interesting narrative. That style limitation killed my drive to work on it, though. However, I still remained interested in the time period, and an incidental remark from a friend about Governor Howard Dean two years ago pushed me to make this.
All the Way to Washington has changed a lot in the two years since I first imagined this timeline. It was initially going to be called Wish You Were Here—an homage to kitschy old postcards that the Dean campaign itself made in early months. And I think it’s safe to say my vision of “skipping the Primary season and just making it focused on the ‘04 campaign” has swiftly been discarded. Vice president, cabinet, competitors, and events have shifted drastically in my mental map of the timeline—many people have made suggestions as I’ve asked for help; some I still will follow, others I have dropped. I’ll make sure to pay special thanks to people as we dive in, though!
Howard Dean proves himself a tricky character in the “What If?” sphere—a sphere as well-trodden by nerds such as us as well as the layman. In a conversation about him, the topic will inevitably drift towards “What if he had won the nomination?” And here strikes the Dean dilemma. There are two camps that immediately set up when the question is asked. One side will say that Dean would destroy the Democrats’ chances in the election—a fire-breathing radical, he’d send Bush back to the White House on margins comparable to ‘72 or ‘84; Dean was his own worst enemy, a man who would shoot his own foot and made an enemy of the press spewing gaffe after gaffe, culminating in that crescendo of a scream. And there is certainly truth to that. The other side will say that Dean would do better than John Kerry—very likely winning the presidency outright; Dean, they say, actually had an energizing message and a base of support. Kerry, meanwhile, was nominated because he was “presidential,” was respected by all but loved by none; his “flip-flop” nature made him a representation of the Democratic Party’s failings, meanwhile Dean represented a Party that would stand for its own beliefs. And, too, there is truth to that. @Vidal, in his opening to one of the paragons of presidential alternate history, Jimmy Two, has something similar to say about Carter: “In some ways, Carter is the best subject for [alternate history], and in some ways the worst. He is a man of contradictions, and in showing you other decisions he may have made, I have sought only to illustrate his complexity — not to change his character.” Howard Dean fills that similar niche. He was a radical underdog who at the same time expounded a fundamentally Clintonian doctrine of fiscal conservatism; headed a campaign divided between Vermont moderates and Democratic radicals who had previously collaborated on the similarly oddball Jerry Brown campaign a decade previous.
Again, to ape off of Jimmy Two, Vidal quotes one of his inspirations, a proverbial “North Star” that drove him throughout the process. I figure it is respectful to do the same, although admittedly it is far less insightful. “Jimmy Carter’s second [term] isn’t going to be fun for Ted Kennedy or most Democrats, and it won’t even be that fun for Jimmy Carter, but I hope it’s fun for all of us as we consider what might have been,” Vidal writes, and I think that’s important. It is important that we acknowledge failure as well as success, and write both in the deserved amount of detail. I have grown fond of Howard Dean, in my time researching; he is at times brash, headstrong, compassionate, and correct. He was, ultimately, an underdog—especially in hindsight, where it is easy to see him flying up-up-up, like Icarus, into the sun. I would be doing the man a disservice if I did not acknowledge his capacity for failure as well as his capacity for achievement.
Conversely, achievement is important here, too. Howard Dean the Man has been dwarfed over and over, compounding as the years march on, by the Dean Scream. Often I have heard it said the Scream “ruined a political career,” ignoring that Dean brushed himself off and became Chairman of the Democratic National Committee a year later. When we talk about Barack Obama, we say he was the first presidential candidate to effectively utilize the Web; when we talk about the 2006 midterms, we say it was the impressive power of Bush’s failures that allowed such a massive electoral landslide. That Obama’s campaign higher-ups were directly inspired by Dean’s powerful use of Web infrastructure is swept aside; that Howard Dean’s DNC empowered local parties to field candidates, gave funding to every state and every race instead of just the ones that operatives thought were the statistical best odds has been left to the wayside. I understand why, of course. It’s trimming the fat. But I think it is dishonest to portray solely Dean the Screamer as opposed to Dean the Politician. But, then again, I am a sucker for homage.
Join me as we embark on Howard Dean’s Magical Alternate History Tour—where we imagine a world wherein Howard Dean does not only go to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, but to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona—North Dakota and New Mexico, California and Texas and New York. Where we see a Howard Dean that goes to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan; a Dean that ultimately makes it all the way to Washington D.C. to take back the White House. YEAAAGH!
“I decided in August [2001] that I wasn’t going to run again. It then quickly came to me that I had a choice of joining boards and swearing at the New York Times every morning and saying how outrageous it was. Basically, I was in a position where I thought I could run for president, so I decided that I was going to.”
- Howard Dean (in One-Car Caravan)
“Without Dean, the Democratic primaries are lapsing into a synthetic and unsatisfying beauty pageant.”
- Joe Klein
"I've watched over a thousand hockey games in my life, because both my son and daughter played youth hockey, and complaining about results like that is just, woulda, coulda, shoulda. The referee may make a bad call, and you lose, too bad. That's [...] part of the game. So I think that you just have to roll with the punches."
- Howard Dean
- Howard Dean (in One-Car Caravan)
“Without Dean, the Democratic primaries are lapsing into a synthetic and unsatisfying beauty pageant.”
- Joe Klein
"I've watched over a thousand hockey games in my life, because both my son and daughter played youth hockey, and complaining about results like that is just, woulda, coulda, shoulda. The referee may make a bad call, and you lose, too bad. That's [...] part of the game. So I think that you just have to roll with the punches."
- Howard Dean
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