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They say he could hear voices and because of that some feared him, others thought he had come unhinged, while the rest ignored him, turning away, avoiding looking into his eyes the way people shun looking at someone who talks to himself loudly about things that don�t make any sense.
What made it worse in many eyes was that not only did this man admit hearing those voices but also that he went even further by insisting that others also better listen. AND he warned that if they refused to listen they might lose everything they had.
Yet some found the idea of a man, especially a politician, hearing voices intriguing. Perhaps this curiosity came from knowing that composers, writers, painters, visionaries and prophets hear voices all the time. The Greeks knew this and gave the voices a name�Muses, from which we derive a double-edged word that could signify day-dreaming or profound thoughts.
That the man who heard these voices should become head of the Democratic National Committee says something about our times and the state of the Democratic Party. For the Republicans this choice represented for once and for all their belief that their political rivals had truly lost their minds. But they didn’t get it because they prefer not to hear those voices the same way they prefer not to believe Joseph McCarthy almost destroyed our democracy or that there weren’t weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
That man is Howard Dean and because he heard those voices and had the courage to not only admit it but to insist those voices told the truth, the Democratic Party, which still lies in intensive care, received a much-needed transfusion. Some would argue that transfusion may have saved the party. No one can deny today that it was sorely needed.
One voice especially went beyond the bounds of rationality for many Democrats because it bordered on acknowledging the existence of ghosts or spirits. That voice came from the ether and in it lay thousands, even millions of other voices, all of them frustrated that no one would listen to them anymore. Those voices found the ether or the ether found them because traditional methods of communication had become clogged up–dare I say constipated. Howard Dean insisted those voices had power, saying, “We are the great grassroots campaign of the modern era, built from mouse pads, shoe leather and hope.” To prove his point he raised huge sums of money from the ether. It was as if coins rained down from the sky.
The second voice insisted that out there lay those who felt alone, disenfranchised, powerless and frustrated. Dean revived an old idea to give those voices power. He called them Meet-Ups, although they just as easily could have been called coffees or potlucks. Suddenly people could look across a room and realize they were not alone; that there existed others who felt as they did and cared just as passionately about the same ideas. With each connection the wattage of this movement increased until it burned too brightly to be ignored.
But there was also a third voice, one not so easily acknowledged for those who had forgotten what it sounded like. Unabashedly echoing Paul Wellstone, Howard Dean set out to show not what was, but what could be. Like some crazed, pith-helmeted explorer staggering through the impenetrable jungle that is the modern political campaign, Howard Dean hacked this way and that as he pressed forward with his singular mission to rediscover it.
“It” in Dean�s mind was the Eldorado of the Democratic Party and Liberal America: that fabled place where somehow Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal and its belief that government existed to keep the playing field level still lived on. For half a century most Democratic contenders had thought such a quest impossible or even mad. The fabulous world of FDR and the New Deal had receded past memory, its true location so lost and out of reach that its path had been grown over by the twisted vines of equivocation and submerged under the weeds that choked the Era of Bad Feelings.
The map, if it ever existed–for in the minds of most it had seemed to be only a legend or a crude forgery–had not merely become lost, it had become irrelevant. That was the message Bill Clinton and Al Gore had hammered home again and again with their sermons about the New Democrats. That was the point of all those lush weekends in Edenic settings, where the truly enlightened sat in plush chairs drinking herbal tea and listening to one another expound on the Powerpoint charts, tables and statistics affirming the existence of their self-styled renaissance.
In Iowa in 2004, Dean may not have made it to Eldorado, but like some other explorers he may have stumbled across something of great value, something that if people would only recognize it could change the face of the world. Like those explorers who helped to end what my grade school history books called the Dark Ages, Dean showed there was a new world out there wide open with possibility.
The “barbaric yawp– a phrase Walt Whitman used to describe the democratic message of Leaves of Grass– that caused Dean so much trouble in Iowa in fact can now be seen as an expression of all those voices and that possibility much as Whitman called for America to speak in its authentic voice. In Dean’s yawp lies the voices of small town cafes with neon signs missing a letter or two, the voices of inner city neighborhoods where the sounds of kids bouncing basketballs can just barely be heard over the rhythms of the boombox they have sitting on the ground nearby, the voices of factory workers who now punch buttons instead of swinging sledgehammers but do so with the same subtle touch that makes what they do still a craft.
Although no one still recognizes it, Dean was asking a very relevant question: What if the whole Hollywood production that has been titled “America�s Right Turn,” is nothing more than a phantom, a marketing creation, a fad, right up there with Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch dolls? What if the strategy of the Democratic Party was merely like one of those bad Hollywood sequels, Rocky VIII, Crocodile Dundee Does Kansas City, Superman Redux? What if there was an error on the part of all the pundits who have made American politics a cacophonous squawk like a huge flock of crows descending on a particularly foul and rotting corpse?
Dean officially announced his presidential candidacy in June 2003, fully a year ahead of the convention and half a year before the first primaries. In his announcement he threw down a gauntlet to his own party saying, “Most importantly, I have wanted my party to stand up for what we believe in again.” What Howard Dean was trying to tell us was that the rise of the Republican Counterrevolution could be a much more complex and sinister phenomenon that the mere fact that one bright morning in America people had suddenly awakened and decided to become Republicans.
Howard Dean showed that Liberal America still had a pulse, and a pretty strong one at that. All the prescriptions and therapies being advocated by the self-designated care givers such as “slowing down” and “relaxing,” “toning down” the advocacy may in fact be doing the patient more harm than good. Four and one-half years later he is still trying to convey the same message and four years later, the Democratic Party now acknowledges the voices, but hears them only faintly.
As head of the Democratic National Committee, Dean has most notably been associated with the 50-state strategy–a process which in some cases has had him literally building local parties from the ground up. The 50-state strategy has also put him squarely at odds with party leaders like Rahm Emanuel who believe the Party should concentrate its efforts.
If Clintonism and triangulation left the party bereft of a vision, the notion of focusing on key states has slowly eroded its national base. Any systems thinker worthy of the name could see the ultimate result of the Emanuel strategy would be a one-state party.
Yet Dean has still not been able to gain traction on the most contentious issue of all–what do the Democrats stand for? As the Party gets ready to meet early next month it still remains a cobbled together federation of interest groups. What Dean needs to do now is to begin facilitating a dialogue in the Party about what are its core values. The values of Liberal America certainly make an excellent starting point for that discussion.
There is an instructive historical lesson in this. The core value of Liberal America weaves through the fabric of the American experience, holding it together. No single party can lay claim to those values over the entire history of this nation. With that in mind, there exists the very real possibility that it is the Democrats that may become extinct.
Howard Dean and others are determined not to see this happen. Now they need to speak louder and more forcefully in defense of those values.
Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,
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