“Put you hands together for a man who’s been travelin’ like a bluesman all over the country. Governor Dean!”
Woooooo-hoooooo!
Over by the bar, near the TV transmitting CNN coverage of the power blackout, it wasn’t easy to spot Vermont’s former head of state. Yet a gaggle of humid, fervid Howard Dean supporters and a few actual customers got into the spirit of this good-timey photo opportunity and woo-hoo’d anyway.
Then the compactly built Dean — looking like a lost member of the Kingston Trio, down to the blue pinstriped shirt — took the stage and strapped on an acoustic guitar. He took it, though not in a stand-back-world, get-off-of-my-runway way.
There’s a certain shyness to Dean, but it’s constantly at war with his impatience. If there’s one thing Dean has to watch as an orator, it’s this: Even his good speeches carry an undercurrent of how many times do I have to explain this to you people? That’s a long way from George Bush’s have I completed my sentence yet? mastery of the issues, but still, it’s a concern.
Democrats may as well play the blues literally, since they’re playing them metaphorically. Just when warm water starts lapping at the ankles of the president in the form of questions about waging war on Iraq, along comes a California gubernatorial recall circus led by Arnold, the Circus Strongman. Then comes a blackout.
Hello? Iowa calling — is anyone there?
While the Republicans got on with their merry coup out West, one Democrat in particular got on with his mojo in Iowa. Dean has enjoyed a media blitz this month topped by simultaneous Time and Newsweek covers. He is August’s political Mr. Man. Or was, at least, until an ex-bodybuilder went on Leno and made his little joke about getting a bikini wax.
As a recently deposed Mr. Man, if you’re going to play the blues while running for president, the time to do it is 15 months before the election. That way, people have some time to forget it ever happened in case it turns out to be one of those Dukakis-in-a-tank crises, such stuff that Republican dreams are made on.
Introduced Thursday by guitarist and singer Michael “Hawkeye” Herman, who looks like a hipper version of Jim Varney, Dean played three songs — two on guitar, one, a Herman-penned campaign ditty, on harmonica — at the un-bluesy hour of 5:30 p.m. The location: Blues on Grand, a bar anchoring a four-story building with a “for rent” sign advertising apartments to let, in a patchy part of downtown Des Moines.
Dean did his level, concerted and hard-working best to get down, or reasonably down.
Earlier in the day, the candidate brought the same seriousness of purpose to his duties at the Iowa Pork Tent, at the state fair. Surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of chops on massive outdoor grills, Dean made a little small talk with the grilling men, donned work gloves and helped the workers hoist a grill laden with nicely done meat. Then, wielding a burger flipper, Dean carefully filled a lined wastebasket with chops, right up to the brim.
You can kiss babies or you can shovel pork, but you cannot say vaudeville is dead. It is alive and reasonably well in Iowa politics, the out-of-town tryout for the national political stage.
Forums in candidates’ future
Most of the nine Democratic candidates, in varying combinations, have agreed to take part in a relentless schedule of political forums, sponsored by groups such as the Iowa Federation of Labor (Waterloo, last Wednesday) or health care workers (Des Moines, Thursday).
These are Dem-by-Dem affairs, sharing a vaudeville-style roster. The candidates focus their stump speeches on the issues at hand and answer questions.
In these early campaign days. it’s hard to go wrong with angry. Angry gets a crowd going, particularly the labor crowd. In Iowa, Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean lead the angry-dog pack, in terms of rhetorical rancor. When Dick Gephardt tries it, focusing attention on “the Wal-Mart game” of underpaid, uninsured employees, it doesn’t quite come off. Gephardt’s innate, career-pol geniality gets in his way.
It’s a strange thing. In California, recall gubernatorial front-runner Schwarzenegger is all smiles and George Hamilton tan, after making so many millions by being so sociopathically enraged in so many of his films. In Iowa, guys like Dean and Kucinich, and even John Kerry — who can do angry without losing a speck of his patrician calm — are going nuts.
In Iowa, it’s zinger time. John Edwards, whom many like but who nearly everybody believes has run for president four years too early, likes saying that Bush has “taken a 2-by-4 to the American dream.” Kerry’s reliable applause-getter, at least in Waterloo: “We should not be putting firefighters to work and schoolteachers to work in Baghdad and laying them off in the United States of America.”
Gephardt enjoys his share of one-liners, though they’re peculiarly stilted. Regarding the Enron executives who remain free as birds and rich as Midas: “They got golden parachutes, while the workers are lucky to go to the golden arches.” (Pause.) “To get a hamburger.” (Pause.) “At McDonald’s.”
Dean doesn’t pause to save his life. He can whip through a speech like a physician way, way behind in his rounds. Yet Wednesday in Waterloo and Thursday in Des Moines, his rancor carried a sense of modulation. The longer Kucinich stays in the race, the more Dean will come off as not quite the angriest Dem in the field.
Knows his stuff
Dean the Righteous was absent on stage Thursday night. His black-loafered foot-tapping in time to the music, he rarely looked up from his fingering hand. But he didn’t miss a note.
“I told you he could play,” says “Hawkeye” Herman, who went to college with one of Dean’s campaign workers.
Herman’s ditty, “Dean for America,” is unlikely to go down in political history as the most galvanizing of campaign songs. Sample lyric:
It’s Dean for America/Dean for America/It’s Dean for America/Dean for America/Dean for America/Dean for America.
But Dean charged things up between harmonica choruses. “You have the POWER!” he exhorted his supporters. You are “the DEMOCRATIC WING of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY!”
“Hawkeye” Herman acknowledged after the set that it’s probably easier to look presidential playing the guitar than the harmonica, “because your face doesn’t turn red.”
Afterward, pressing flesh and making for the exit, Dean said he liked playing, though “playing in public is something different.”
“He was a little nervous, but he was happy to do it,” says Dave Leschtz, Dean’s constituency outreach director.
Blues on Grand owner Jeff Wagner later jokingly described Dean’s harmonica style as “pretty much `candidate for president.’ But, you know, low-down. Delta. Raw.”
And it was fun, especially for a canned campaign event, one more stop on the vaudeville circuit.
A half-hour later, everybody was gone. Outside the bar, the campaign worker with the DEAN FOR AMERICA T-shirt took down the last of the four HOWARD DEAN FOR PRESIDENT signs taped to the building. And the Dean tent show moved to a new town.
