This Deaniac Remains Tattooed to the Cause

Howard Dean’s exit from the presidential race last week was hard enough for the average Dean fanatic to swallow. So imagine how much harder the news was for Kimmy Cash, who wears Dean’s name on her right forearm. Forever. She had “Dean ... Hope ... Truth ... 2004” tattooed on Nov. 17, Dean’s 55th birthday.

Cash, a 28-year-old mother of two from Monrovia, became a Dean junkie last year after spending most of her life as a punk-rock junkie. The sensibilities and connections she forged as a fan -- and, more recently, as the wife of a singer-guitarist in a “psychobilly” band -- helped her become one of the most colorful Internet organizers in the Dean constellation.

Her punxfordean.org website claims to have 16,000 people signed up as Dean supporters, half of whom had not been registered to vote.

While many devotees of the site were sending her despondent e-mails late last week, wondering what to do with themselves politically, Cash was retooling the site, urging a “draft Dean” movement. In suspending his campaign, Dean was simply trying to get out of the media’s cruel spotlight, Cash reasoned.

She posted emotional reminders that punk-rockers never give up, that it was still important to elect Dean delegates from California on March 2 to create leverage for the former Vermont governor.

She also was going full-bore on a Feb. 29 Dean-for-president concert in Santa Monica, where groups with names like Wasted Time and The Wreck would perform, and where she would announce the formation of another website to keep Dean’s vision alive and a political action committee to support like-minded politicians.

The tattoo? It’s staying. It was her 35th, she said.

“All my tattoos mean something,” Cash said. “No matter what, I still led this life.”

The Dean campaign boasted scores of websites from various groups -- Catholics for Dean, Foodies for Dean, Unemployed for Dean, Two Uncles for Dean -- resulting in more than 600,000 volunteers joining via the Internet. But Cash’s success -- she established Punx for Dean chapters in all 50 states -- won her a certain respect among more experienced organizers.

“She’s kind of a star,” said Mike Meurer, a West Los Angeles marketing company administrator who created Cyclists for Dean after working as a precinct captain for Clinton/Gore in 1992 and 1996. “She got so many people involved who are typically apathetic.”

Cash, who adds red streaks to her dark hair and has several nose piercings, said she was raised in a Democrat household in Ontario, Calif., where voting was encouraged.

Older sisters introduced her to the defiant nature of punk rock. She left home at 13, spending several years on her own -- “It was all me, not my parents. I was a jerk.” She said she tried college on several occasions but never stuck with it.

Last year she made a living by selling vintage items over E-Bay, and lived in a converted garage with her husband, Frankie, his 7-year-old son and their 3-year-old daughter when the pending war in Iraq threw her into a rage.

Cash wanted to oppose it politically. She was already sampling opinions of fellow punk rockers -- and finding out that few had any enthusiasm for the ’04 election -- when she went to a February 2003 rally in Los Angeles for Dean.

“I stayed up until 3 a.m. that night reading about him on the Internet. At one point I woke up my husband and said, “This is the guy.”

She said she wrote to all the Democratic campaigns offering her involvement, but the Dean campaign was the only one that got back to her. The next month she sneaked into the VIP section of another Dean rally at Union Station and met him. Cash said she stayed up all night again creating punxfordean.

“It was the passion in him. I could not sit around and look at my kids and my friends and not expose them to him,” she said.

The campaign already had a college-age website, but Cash wanted her own. She’d seen what word-of-mouth could do for bands.

Punxfordean was the place where you could learn that Dean had been endorsed by Tony Cortez of Ill Repute and Brandon Cruz of Dr. Know, as well as by Gregg Turner, a founder of the seminal punk band The Angry Samoans, and by Nicole Panter, one-time manager of The Germs.

It was the site that would rail at Urban Outfitters for offering a shirt that said, “Voting is for Old People.”

“Write every single head honcho at Urban Outfitters and tell them how brilliantly moronic they are!” Cash commanded members.

The night Dean finished third in the Iowa caucuses and unleashed his now-infamous speech to a national television audience, Cash could not imagine the moment would plague the campaign. “I thought [the scream] was the coolest!”

She remains bitter at the news media for its obsession with the image, and the suggestion that his speech to Iowa volunteers revealed Dean as “unpresidential.” It had never dawned on her that he would not be the nominee. But as Dean’s losses mounted, she began to realize she’d been naive.

To the doubting e-mails from Dean supporters that started crossing her site, Cash reminded them: “Look at where we started, a 28-year-old mom with 2 kids, a partner that was unemployed, and a computer on the verge of a meltdown.... I’m doing everything I can short of selling my last pairs of Dickies” to promote concerts for Dean.

Before the Iowa caucuses, 77 people had signed up for a bus trip from Los Angeles to a New Mexico Punks For Dean concert on Jan. 31. Only a couple dozen wound up going.

Cash had stopped most of her E-Bay selling and was putting most of her time into Dean activities, staying up nights. She sold about $300 worth of vintage clothes -- “that’s a month’s worth of groceries for the family” -- to buy Internet ads to draw more traffic to her site.

She was hoping for a strong second-place finish for Dean in Wisconsin last week. Instead, Dean finished a weak third behind Sens. John F. Kerry and John Edwards. She stayed up election night, waiting for Dean’s Wednesday-morning announcement.

When Dean finally bowed out, she went to her computer, and wrote: “We have been through entirely too much in this campaign to quit now. Punks don’t give up. People with heart and passion DO NOT GIVE UP ... not anymore. Do not let this discourage you.”

She concluded: “Anybody even thinking about e-mailing me and telling me to get over it better think again!”

She started designing a new website: progressivepunks.org.

On Friday night, Cash was getting ready to drive to San Bernardino to audition a band for the Santa Monica show. Though she was still angry with the Democratic Party and the news media, she was also still enthralled by politics.

Three weeks short of turning 29, Cash felt she was in the vortex of something thrilling, unpredictable.

“There’s nothing in my life that compares with this -- with the exception of having my daughter,” she said. Then she paused. “And this almost even kicks that!”