Four years ago, I placed a bumper sticker on my car emblazoned "Howard Dean for America." It is still there. Other stickers have come and gone since then, but the Howard Dean for America sticker remains.
I received the sticker after making a donation to Dean's 2004 presidential effort, the first and only time I've given my credit card number to a political campaign. I felt strongly enough about Dean to allow his campaign to deduct money from my credit card for the next six months. It was a small price to pay for freedom from the suffocating status quo represented by other candidates at the time.
Dean did not, like the rest of them, play patty-cake. He played for keeps. And because I have yet to find a candidate—at least one who stood a chance of getting elected to any office—to inspire me the way Dean did back then, the sticker stays.
I'm pondering whether to place an Obama sticker next to it. Obama's recent Senate vote to allow immunity for the telecommunications companies that illegally spied on Americans and his vow to increase faith-based initiatives have made me warier than I want to be about him. How far will he go to pander to that mythical "undecided" voter? I have never gotten that same sense of pandering from Dean.
Even so, I will be ecstatic when America chooses a black man with a "foreign"-sounding name as president over a self-sainted maverick "war hero." But I still think that Dean should get more credit for changing the political landscape to make it possible for Obama to stand so close to making history. It was only four years ago, but it seems like a decade. The Republicans had a stranglehold on power—a majority in Congress and on the Supreme Court and an intractable criminal regime in the White House. All three branches of government were in lockstep with the mainstream media cheering them on.
Yet a former mayor of Burlington and governor of Vermont stepped up and said what needed saying and, by doing that, he recharged America's batteries. When all was dark and hope seemed a luxury, Dean was the only glimmer of light. He also seemed to relish fighting in the trenches and had enough energy to take on all comers, something none of the other candidates, with their test-marketed spins and spineless sucking up, seemed to do. As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he implemented a 50-state strategy that, though mocked by the Beltway Democrats at the time, has the party on the verge of an historic landslide victory.
Another feather in his cap: Dean inspired hatred among the embeds in D.C. The press corps covered his campaign as if he were an al Qaeda operative, condescendingly calling his supporters "Deanie Babies" and "Deaniacs." Anyone who got Cokie Roberts' and Brit Hume's knickers in such a twist was A-OK with me.
And when in December, 2003 he said, "The United States is no safer today, after capturing Saddam Hussein, than we were before he was captured," I nearly fainted. Though he was correct, the fact that a national leader would have the guts to go right into the Bush-Cheney wheelhouse and toss that flaming bag of feces in their face showed moral courage. Of course, it was political suicide. Americans can't stand too much honesty too soon.
At the Netroots Nation conference in Austin last week, Paul Krugman made that point with stunning clarity. He told the group of progressive bloggers that the media's failure was not due to politics but to lack of what Dean had in spades: guts. Krugman said their credo was, "It's better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right& There's something wrong with you if you actually figure this out too early."
Dean figured it all out in 2003. It was too early for his own political aspirations. Fortunately, he wasn't too late to save the rest of us.
