Shooting From the Hip, Dean Drew Fire

The day after Saddam Hussein was caught in his spider hole, Howard Dean stepped before a crush of TV cameras to offer a statesmanlike appraisal.

It was “not a day to talk about politics,” the former Vermont governor said that muggy December morning in Palm Beach, Fla. He saluted the military and called it “a great day” for the Bush administration.

Fewer than 24 hours later, however, Dean’s tone shifted -- and along with it the fortunes of his high-flying campaign.

As his caravan motored to a Los Angeles hotel, Dean penciled a new line into the foreign policy address he was about to give. He had labored for months over the speech, helped by a team of eminent advisors that included former Vice President Al Gore.

But that one line inserted on the spur of the moment, an assertion that Hussein’s capture had not made America safer, dominated the headlines and reverberated in the Democratic presidential campaign for weeks.

The statement was the kind of off-the-cuff observation that had long endeared Dean to legions of disaffected Democrats. But to many just tuning in to the presidential contest, it seemed wrong, and even a little reckless.

Although it was unclear at the time -- and the truth of Dean’s statement can still be debated -- the comment marked the beginning of his descent from front-runner to the straits he finds himself in today.

“I think it sent shock waves,” said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. “It was just too out there for a lot of people ... and Dean’s believability index started slipping.”

After being shut out in the first 11 nominating contests -- including Saturday’s caucuses in Michigan and Washington state -- Dean is hoping a win on Feb. 17 in Wisconsin can salvage his candidacy. But even his top advisors have conceded the strategy is a longshot.

And in a further setback, Dean on Saturday lost the endorsement of one of the country’s largest unions -- the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The mid-November decision by AFSCME and the Service Employees International Union, another large labor group, to back Dean was a major boost and added to the sense that Dean was steamrolling toward the nomination.

With its record-shattering Internet fundraising and overflow crowds at rallies, the Dean campaign had often seemed to defy the laws of political physics. He showed a shaky command of issues during a summer interview on “Meet the Press”; he caused a flap last fall by saying he wanted to appeal to Southerners who embrace the Confederate flag; he drew fire for sealing some of his gubernatorial records.

None of it seemed to matter to his supporters, who had been thrilled by his early and staunch opposition to the war in Iraq.

But in the end, Dean was tripped up in large part by human frailties: impulsiveness, inexperience and an unwavering confidence -- a reflection, perhaps, of his physician’s training, which kept him from modifying his strategy to fit changing circumstances, as if doing so was admitting a misdiagnosis.

Dean has said he was never comfortable in the role of early front-runner, and it showed. The candidate and his staff also made rash decisions, spent too much money and physically overtaxed themselves.

“There wasn’t the restraint and maturity of husbanding resources for the long haul,” said David Nagle, a former Iowa congressman and Dean backer in that crucial state. “You don’t need a different color T-shirt at every event.... They were spending resources like there was no tomorrow.”

As the front-runner, Dean came under withering fire from his opponents and heightened scrutiny from the media, and failed to bear up well under either. He was the first to attack the other major Democratic candidates, denouncing their backing of the Iraq war and calling them craven for not being tougher on Bush. But Dean grew irritable when he became the target, at one point asking Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe to muzzle his foes.

Flush with cash, the campaign decided to forsake federal matching funds, freeing Dean to spend as much money as he could raise. He bought ads in several states and boasted of running a national campaign. The idea was to win Iowa and New Hampshire, then lock up the nomination in the contests that quickly followed.

But Dean strategists badly miscalculated. Heady with their stratospheric success, the candidate and his crew mistakenly thought the passion of die-hard “Deaniacs” would translate into a groundswell of support. When Dean stumbled in Iowa and New Hampshire, dropping both to Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the campaign was at a loss -- and nearly broke.

“We never had a second act,” said one senior advisor.

In short, the laws of political physics finally caught up with Dean, who learned the hard way that successful candidates bend to their immutable force, not the other way around.

It all began unraveling in Iowa, coming apart with remarkable speed.

When Dean gave his now-notorious speech after coming in third in the state’s caucuses, he gave voice to the very quality that most worried many Democrats: He lacked the judgment and temperament to beat Bush.

“That crushed us,” a Dean advisor said.

The moment, showed endlessly on cable TV and spread worldwide via the Internet, might not have damaged Dean so much had it not followed a gaffe-filled stretch in which the candidate tossed out one controversial remark after another.

He gave a domestic policy speech that rivals portrayed as an attack on former President Clinton. He highlighted his own inexperience by saying he would seek a vice presidential running mate with a foreign policy background “to plug that hole in the resume.” He escalated his fight with party centrists by calling them the “Republican wing of the Democratic Party.”

Dean had made his share of outspoken, and sometimes misleading, statements earlier in the campaign. But a turning point seemed to come when Dean won the surprise endorsement of Gore in mid-December.

“At that point, alarm bells went off in newsrooms all across America, in all the different campaigns and among the Washington establishment,” said Joe Trippi, Dean’s ex-campaign manager. “People went, ‘Oh man, this guy’s going to be it.’ ”

Suddenly, every mistake Dean made was magnified. Coverage of his campaign, his past comments, and his record as Vermont governor grew more aggressive.

Still, Dean refused to temper his remarks, even when they kicked up a fuss, dismissing the reaction as “gotcha politics.”

But the political climate was changing, as more voters began focusing on the campaign. Dean’s outspokenness suddenly became a liability.

“We have an electability year, not a speak-your-mind year,” said Andrew Stern, the SEIU president who, while sticking with Dean, has sounded increasingly skeptical of his chances. “Dean got across the threshold ... when he convinced people he could win through his fundraising and endorsements. But since then, he’s lost ground.”

As Iowa’s Jan. 19 caucuses neared, Dean supporters were noticing the change, even if the candidate hadn’t.

“When I talk to people about Howard Dean, they say, ‘The guy shoots from the hip, he gets himself in trouble, he’s arrogant,’ ” Weldon Abarr, a carpenter, told Dean in Boone, Iowa, in early January. “I’m a little afraid about what’s going to happen.”

Dean’s response was quick -- and revealing.

“They say, ‘Howard, he can’t be elected, he said the capture of Saddam hasn’t made us any safer.’ Well, we’re now at Code Level Orange,” he said, referring to the national security alert system. “We now have fighter pilots escorting aircraft through American airspace. We’ve lost 23 more American troops since Saddam was caught.”

Dean shrugged his shoulders and smiled confidently. “Seems to me maybe I was right and they were wrong?”

Still, the question persisted, at nearly every stop across Iowa and New Hampshire: How are you going to beat Bush?

“Electability” became the buzzword and the one quality seemingly atop every voter’s priority list.

Dean told crowds he wasn’t going to beat Bush -- they were.

“I believe we are the only campaign that is capable of bringing new people into the electoral process with enormous enthusiasm,” he said in late December. “We’re going to energize the daylights out of the Democratic Party and the people who voted third party last time.”

But as Dean touted the strength of his following, another candidate emerged who was also willing to take on Bush -- this one a Vietnam veteran with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, a reassuringly sober demeanor and a gravelly voice weighted with authority.

John F. Kerry had grown desperate toward the end of 2003. His campaign was nearly out of money and, worse, had lost several top staffers in a messy shake-up. Kerry mortgaged his mansion on Boston’s Beacon Hill, brought in new managers with ties to the state’s senior senator, Edward M. Kennedy, and settled on a strategy pinning his hopes on Iowa.

Instead of speaking in long, discursive passages as though he were still on Capitol Hill, Kerry began delivering shorter, punchier speeches. He opened himself up to marathon question-and-answer sessions with undecided voters. Crowds began to build and the candidate’s confidence grew.

Dean, meantime, was struggling. A 4-year-old videotape surfaced in which he criticized the Iowa caucuses. The story made headlines across the state and took up the first 20 minutes of one nightly news show in Des Moines. “We knew we were in deep trouble,” said one campaign strategist.

There were also signs that Dean’s grass-roots appeal -- built on his opposition to the Iraq war -- had hit a ceiling.

The number of supporters signing up on Dean’s website hovered at 500,000 for much of December and January -- far below the 900,000 that Trippi had forecast.

Soon, it became clear that the ebullient crowds that packed events to hear the former Vermont governor were not necessarily representative of a larger pool of voters captivated by Dean. They were the voters captivated by Dean.

On an icy evening in early January, more than 800 giddy supporters jammed into the ballroom of a hotel in Fargo, N.D., and greeted Dean with half a dozen standing ovations. A month later, just 1,231 North Dakotans cast ballots for Dean. In Iowa, the campaign had identified 37,000 voters who said they definitely intended to vote for Dean in the state’s Jan. 19 caucuses. Dean got 18,000 votes, a dismal showing that stunned the campaign.

The night of the Iowa caucuses Dean gave his frenzied speech, defiantly rejecting the voters’ verdict.

Later, he said he was trying to buck up the young campaign workers who had poured their hearts out for his candidacy. It was a performance urged by some top aides. But it epitomized the shortsightedness of Dean and his campaign.

“We were just talking to the people in that hall, when someone should have taken a deep breath and realized we were talking to a national audience,” one strategist said. “It should have been about electability, electability, electability -- and instead we fed into everyone’s biggest concern.”

After Iowa, Dean mounted a charm offensive. He poked fun at himself on the David Letterman show and sat for a prime-time interview with his seldom-seen wife, Judy. His speeches worked in more references to his son’s hockey games and Dean’s career as a doctor.

But his attempts to show a softer side weren’t enough. Dean placed a distant second in New Hampshire, and has finished far back in the nine contests since then. And polls show him far behind in Wisconsin, his “must-win” state.

Last week in Madison, Wis., Dean was cheered by a crowd of 700 enthusiasts packed into a club. They stomped on the floor and screamed until they were hoarse. The scene recalled the energetic rallies that marked Dean’s candidacy in its heady days last summer. Now, however, Dean realized passion was not enough.

“We need your help,” the beleaguered candidate told the crowd. “It’s a lot of fun to come to this and have a hootin’ and hollerin’ time and crank everybody up.”

But, he added, “We’ve got to win.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Dean expenditures

Although Howard Dean shattered Democratic fundraising records in 2003 with the help of an innovative Internet strategy, the campaign poured much of its $41-million war chest into advertising and campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Dean finished a disappointing third and second, respectively. Here are the campaign’s expenditures through Dec. 31, 2003.

*--* Advertising: electronic media $7,484,984 Salaries and payroll taxes $5,523,912 Direct mail fundraising $5,193,749 Traditional campaigning $3,188,552 Fundraising events $2,670,852 Travel $2,442,254 Persuasion mail/brochures $1,246,233 Computers/office equipment $832,840 Telephone $753,266 Rent/utilities $616,642 Polling $448,933 Office furniture/supplies $412,117 Telemarketing $410,556 Lawyers/accountants $192,913 Other taxes $191,454 Staff/volunteers $37,191 Bank fees $23,255 Advertising: other media $5,995 Other $3,838 Donations $2,786 Food/meetings $2,124 Constituent gifts, entertainment $1,033 Total expenditures $31,685,479 Total receipts $41,382,594 Cash on hand $9,697,115

*--*

Source: Campaign Finance Analysis Project