Howard Dean: 'Politics is a dirty business but it's on our doorstep and we have to deal with it'
Former Democrat presidential candidate and founder of Democracy for America
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Howard Dean is still fighting. It has been more than three months since the former Vermont governor's blazing presidential campaign crashed as spectacularly as it soared out of nowhere. But he is still touring the country, still articulating his blunt assessments of all that ails the United States, still agitating to give George Bush the proverbial one-way bus ticket back to Crawford, Texas.
His focus has changed. It is no longer Dean For America - the name of his presidential campaign website - but Democracy For America. Instead of the White House, his goal has become a wholesale redefinition of American politics through the grassroots movement he created: to transform the Democratic Party from "a party without backbone" into a real opposition to Republicans.
Already, he is backing candidates across a broad spectrum of lower-order political races for Congress and state offices. The idea is to organise to try to beat Republican incumbents wherever they are. It may not be easy to shift political trends to the left in a time of crisis and war, but Mr Dean believes it is essential and - thanks to the extremism of the Bush administration - possible.
Mr Dean is the first to admit he would much rather be leading the process from the presidential campaign trail, instead of picking up the pieces of a shattered effort and trying to reshape it. But the energy and edge that propelled him from being the obscure former governor of a politically insignificant New England state into a hero for the new progressive counter-culture are as forthright as ever.
"We're in a civil war here," he told The Independent from the back of a car taking him from one Los Angeles event to another. "This is not the time to be nice. I'm not interested in accommodating people who don't respect our point of view."
When it comes to the war in Iraq, or the growing influence of Christian fundamentalism on public policy, or the mounting budget deficit exacerbated by targeted tax cuts for the wealthy, Mr Dean - in contrast to John Kerry, who beat him to the Democratic presidential nomination - does not believe there is room for compromise with the Bush White House, or any of the like-minded politicians he characterises as "right-wing wackos".
Instead, he believes, the Republicans need to be fought on their own turf, in places where ordinary working-class voters have been persuaded to vote Republican but may yet be open to the notion that they are betraying their own interests.
"You've got to show them the Republicans will never deliver jobs and education because they can't manage money," Mr Dean said. "You've got to talk about the enormous deficits. These are people ... who really struggle with money issues of their own and know they can't go into debt. So when they see the country go into debt, they worry about it."
He told a rally in Los Angeles a few days ago: "Don't be afraid to sign on to a race where you think the candidate can't win. We must make sure not one congressional seat goes unopposed ... Never again are we going to be able to treat politics as a dirty business we don't want anything to do with. It is dirty, but it's on our doorstep and we're going to have to deal with it."
This blunt, fighting talk has endeared Mr Dean to a noisy faction of Democratic progressives, who felt their party had fallen asleep under the Bush administration. Mr Dean had articulated their opposition to the Iraq war, to the lies and obfuscations that led up to it, and to many domestic issues, from environmental deregulation to corporate glad-handing.
But that bluntness was a big turn-off to the media, the professional punditocracy and many mainstream voters who took offence at Mr Dean's refusal to observe the usual niceties of American political discourse, and mistook his candour for a kind of extremist craziness, an absurd mistake, because on bread-and-butter policy issues he has always been unambiguously centrist. In Vermont, it was the left wing, not the mainstream, that saw him as their enemy.
Mr Dean is much easier for a European audience to understand. His brand of politics - feisty, secular, and policy-driven rather than personality-based - would more easily find a home in a parliamentary system than in the US presidential one, with its near-mystical anointment of the commander-in-chief as someone who should always be deferred to and supported on the most urgent matters of state.
No danger of deference from Mr Dean. Events in Iraq, he said, showed President Bush was "almost inept as well as untruthful". Specifically, he wants to put an end to the practice, perfected by President Bill Clinton, of "triangulation", trying to defang the Republicans by advocating policies only slightly at variance with theirs, and getting back to the old-fashioned to-and-fro of a two-party system.
"Our opposition party collapsed, in terms of their willingness to take on the government, and that is what my campaign is about, trying to get the Democrats to function as an opposition party," he said. "You can't take the power back unless you have some opposition. Take the Labour Party in Britain: Blair would be long gone if the Conservatives had a remote potential for leadership, or an attractive programme."
On his most recent swings around America he has found the enthusiasm of his supporters intact, even if numbers are down. These are people who put jobs and marriages and life changes on hold for almost a year to give him their all; and they, like him, do not want to let go of that tremendous energy.
What he preaches is a pragmatic form of empowerment through political organisation. Voting, and getting others to vote, is just the start.
Progressive groups need to take over local Democratic party hierarchies and put up candidates for office, he told the Los Angeles audience, and the way to do that is to be better organised and more impassioned than anyone else. "We've got to keep this alive," he said. "Democracy can't be a spectator sport."
Mr Dean sees the grassroots work of Republican groups such as the Christian Coalition as an instructive model. Starting in the late 1960s, the right began organising communities and in a broad, intensive way. No fight was deemed too trivial, no constituency too marginal. Then, the conservatives used churches and business clubs as their networks, just as the Dean people have the internet. "The longest journey starts with a single step," Mr Dean said. "Sooner or later what happened to the Republicans in 1994 [when they took Congress for the first time in a generation] is going to happen to us."
The extraordinary success of the right gave Mr Dean his political voice. The Iraq war put him on the national map, because he was the only viable presidential candidate with the guts to say he opposed it. But he also challenged every aspect of the post-11 September political landscape, inspiring hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom had never felt able to identify with a candidate. His "civil war" does not lack foot soldiers.
"The extremists on the right are recruiting for me," Mr Dean said. "They believe they have the right to decide what people's private conduct is, what role women will play in society, what's patriotic and what's not. That's not American. That's not what most Americans will support."
Mr Dean's first priority is to get President Bush out of the White House. He has differences with Mr Kerry, but he also realises it is essential to vote for him rather than Ralph Nader or any other fringe candidate who could split the anti-Bush vote. "Under any circumstances, one can imagine John Kerry a better president than George Bush," he said. Senator Kerry, he said, is a "thoughtful person" who has an outstanding record on environmental protection.
"I am vigorously encouraging people to vote for John Kerry," he said. "As for those who want work for him or give to him; well, I hope they'll do that too. They have to believe in this. I think [most] people who supported me will support John Kerry. The question is to what degree.
"Ultimately, individual voters will take the decision," he said. "That choice is going to be dependent on what John Kerry has to say, not what I have to say."
THE CV
Born: 17 November 1948
Education: BA in political science from Yale (1971); medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York (1978)
Jobs: Ran internal medicine practice with his wife, Judith Steinberg, in Shelburne, Vermont
Politics: Served in Vermont House of Representatives (1982-1986); Vermont lieutenant governor (1986-1991); assumed governorship following death of incumbent, Richard Snelling (1991); elected governor five more times (until 2002); campaigned for president, from May 2002 until formal withdrawal in March 2004