Here’s a consolation prize for Howard Dean. Years before Bill Clinton became president, he spoke for so long at a Democratic convention that even diligent journalists and passionate Democrats in the stands were praying someone would get the hook and drag him away from the podium. The ever-verbose Clinton obviously had his own problems much later, but electability was never among them. Remarkably, politicians sometimes outlive their own most foolish moments. That may well be the case for the persistent former governor of Vermont, too.
No one knows what made the didactic doctor Dean scream like some kind of south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line banshee wanna-be during that weird concession speech after the Iowa caucuses, but it was embarrassing enough to stick to him like the deed on a condo in a troubled neighborhood. That’s what happens when TV watches every move you make. Many of us have survived deeply embarrassing non-televised behaviors. Presidential candidates don’t get to have that level of privacy. Having paid a high price for this wahoo moment, Dean has now realized that he really is not going to be president. Now, he is out of it.
But not completely.
Remember the Democratic Leadership Council? It was where moderate southerners like Clinton fled for solace when the rest of the party chased after income redistribution and other ideological excesses that made them seem like a mob of Hollywood-fueled party monsters. Centrist Democrats (which is most of them) pulled out their hair and ran away screaming. Clinton hid for a while, then emerged when he heard the nation’s call, “Send us a wonk.” He picked a good theme song, ran for the center, and then got to be president. Dean may be starting his own version of the DLC, announcing the launch of a “campaign for change.”
It will most likely be all about him.
It would be a good public place for him to hide. He can just sit in there and do what he does well (raise fantastic amounts of money on the Internet) or advocate his causes, whatever they turn out to be. Having won exactly no elections anyplace this time around, he can’t argue he has much of a mandate. That didn’t keep him from getting immense amounts of attention from a media that, as always, found itself playing the Christmas child, enamored of this flinty new political ornament.
Dean departed the race saying he would not give up on one of his big missions, to make the rest of America more like Vermont. Maple syrup, cozy inns, fluffy snows and mountains in our future? We think not.
Everyone knows America should be much more like Chicago.
But if the Vermont part means that Democrats will be more willing to stand up and say what they mean again, to reflect the dreams and needs, and address the fears, of so many people who seem lost to politics, then Howard Dean’s contribution was golden.
He should be thought of as “gone for now.”
