Let us now praise Howard Dean -- and ask him to go gracefully.
Dean performed a real service to his party and to his country. He got into the race early, and bravely, when President Bush, waving the bloody shirt of 9/11, was deemed unbeatable.
Dean demonstrated that there was a real hunger, and not just among the young, for a candidate who would speak truth to power. In a sense, he made it safe for the rest of the Democratic field to be a lot tougher on Bush and his rogue foreign policy. If Bush today seems an incumbent with a glass jaw, history should give Howard Dean a lot of credit.
Dean also invented a new way of doing politics and raising money, via the Internet. Despite the faltering of Dean's candidacy, every other candidate is now imitating the e-fundraising that Dean pioneered, which still has the potential of allowing small money to level the playing field against big money.
And Dean demonstrated anew the small-d democratic potential of electoral politics. He was fond of saying that his campaign "is about you" - the legions of eager volunteers, who were less attracted by Dean personally than by his promise of democratic engagement and political change.
Dean gave a new generation of young people hope in their country's institutions. (Young people keep looking for leaders who reflect their own idealism; and their hopes keep getting dashed -- from Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 to the pre-Monica, pre-triangulation Bill Clinton in 1992, to Howard Dean. But new generations, of the naturally idealistic young, keep being born.Dean was the hero of this one.)
Having given Dean his fair measure of praise, let us now politely bury the cadaver of his candidacy.
If Dean succeeded in blowing open the race, he also failed in several key respects that cannot fairly be blamed on anyone but himself.
For starters, one always had the sense of an odd marriage - the right movement yoked to the wrong guy. This was a progressive grass-roots army in love with a rather tightly-wound centrist candidate. As Governor, after all, Dean was a fiscal conservative to a fault. And, despite his rebirth as a populist in the campaign, neither his policies nor temperament suggested a man ofthe people. Vermont progressives, whose hero is Congressman Bernie Sanders, never regarded Dean as one their own.
Second, Dean's entire machinery of meet-ups and viral enlistment of activists was only the raw material of a new-style campaign. It was something far short of a coherent strategy.
Dean lost badly in Iowa, not just because he went too negative or too shrill, but because his organization was as viral (and ephemeral) as his Internet auxiliary. One recalls the old line, "We anarchists have to get organized." Dean didn't.
Third, it has been said over and over, correctly, that anger takes you only so far. Dean never managed to behave as the front-runner that he briefly was. Harvesting some improbable endorsements, such as Al Gore's, was no substitute for reaching out to the rest of the party. As recently as this week, Dean was still bashing "Washington insiders" - democratically elected officials whohave been fighting the good fight to constrain the extremists in theexecutive branch.
After New Hampshire, I telephoned a friend who was one of Dean's early stalwarts to offer my condolences. He brushed them off. "Dean did it to himself," he said.
And that is a mercy. For, if Dean had been sandbagged by the Democratic Party establishment, you would have thousands of the most energetic of Democratic foot-soldiers going away mad, and with justification. But Steve Grossman's exodus speaks for the entire Dean campaign. There are simply no Dean bitter-enders, unless the candidate himself chooses that role.
Which brings me to the final point. Dean, justly a hero for blowing this race wide open and for showing new ways to energize our democracy, has one remaining task. In the weeks to come, he needs to remember that he, and so many of his supporters, got into this race to oust George W. Bush.
Dean says he's stopped campaigning for president, but wants to continue his movement. It's not entirely clear what that means.
Democrats since the Iowa caucuses have managed to avoid their usual circular firing squad. Nothing would be better for his Party, and for Howard Dean's own remarkable legacy, for Dean himself to now play an unaccustomed role as unifier.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. A version of this column ran in Wednesday's Boston Globe.
