Democratic insiders are in a state about Howard Dean. Their collective professional judgment is that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is his to lose. Their collective emotional judgment is that sending him up against George W. Bush would be a disaster. So stands the moment's conventional wisdom.
Is it right? Well, first, we should note, for the record, that the conventional wisdom about this campaign so far has usually been wrong. John Kerry was the obvious man to beat. Dean was a fringe-ish also-ran who'd be done in by his strident anti-war stance. Dick Gephardt was certain to nail down every major union endorsement. Tarheel charisma-monger John Edwards was sure to take off at some point. Wes Clark, once he entered the race, would quite possibly render the rest of the field immediately irrelevant. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and, you guessed it, wrong.
That said, there are a couple reasons to think that the current conventional wisdom might be right. The first is simply self-fulfilling prophecy -- so many people thinking something can actually make it happen, or not happen as the case may be. If state party chairs and local organizers throughout the South and the Midwest think Dean can't get votes in their states, they will tend not to work hard for him.
This happened, to differing degrees, in both Ohio and West Virginia in 2000. In Ohio, the Gore campaign and local Democrats thought things looked pretty hopeless, and they essentially called their efforts to a halt in early October because they considered the state unwinnable (Gore ended up losing by a mere 3.5 percent). In West Virginia, Gore lost by a bigger margin, and undoubtedly it was chiefly because Bush engaged in a coal-and-culture panderfest. But it's also the case that the Democratic operatives and politicians in the state -- where Democrats still outnumber Republicans better than two-to-one -- kept Gore at arm's length because they believed he couldn't win and didn't want to be too closely associated with him. There were of course many factors in those two states, but clearly one of the factors in both was that Democratic insiders willed defeat. And it can happen again.
The second thing the conventional wisdom has going for it is that it just might be right on the merits. The country's political culture has been so dominated for so long by southerners, and to some extent midwesterners, that getting people from those regions to vote for a Yankee may be like getting Travis Tritt fans to listen to Beyonce. You have to go back eight presidents, to John F. Kennedy, to find a Yankee who won. That was 1960, of course, and it was before the secularists took God out of the classroom, before the Beatles and the Stones (to say nothing of hip-hop), before feminism, before gay rights, and all the rest. The North has been so successfully caricatured in the political discourse as a land of chardonnay-swilling snobs and counter-culture dropouts that capturing the South might be impossible for a Vermonter.
These, at least, are the operative presumptions. But it's also worth remembering that nearly every presumption about Dean so far has been wrong.
For example: Howard Dean getting major union endorsements? This notion was p'shawed up and down the line. But he's got 'em. I went to the event at a Washington hotel on Wednesday where the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees gave him their backing. I've covered enough political events (actually, you don't need to cover that many) to know the difference between real and manufactured enthusiasm. This was as real as real gets, at least before late October of an election year.
I think most pundits have gotten Dean wrong, and continue to miss the point, for one simple reason: They think too much about ideology. Political writers seek ideological explanations first. It's understandable; it's how we think. So, Dean's success must be about his opposition to the war.
Obviously true in part. But it actually explains little about Dean's somersault over his competitors. It has become apparent in recent weeks -- to pundits and to Deaniacs -- that Dean is no flaming liberal at all. He's pro-Second Amendment. Gephardt has whacked him, with some justification, on Medicare. Dean has spoken openly of courting voters who like the Confederate flag. Finally, he broke what is arguably the cardinal rule of effete political liberalism by opting out of the campaign-finance system.
And yet, none of these revelations has furrowed the brow of the Deaniacs one whit. And they haven't because Dean's appeal is not chiefly ideological.
He's the only one of the Democratic nine who is what sports commentators would call an "impact player." He understands how to make an impact on people. He thinks big. He saunters into battle without fear -- and sometimes with less judgment than one might prefer, but even that helps make him interesting. Notice how he managed to prevent his refusal to accept public financing from turning him into a plaything of the fat-cats, instead converting it into yet another glorious manifestation of his ingenuity and his sacred connection to the people.
See him with a crowd and it's not hard to glean the basis of that connection. At the endorsement event, his speech (pretty much his standard stump speech) was about American history, the political culture today and, most of all, the people in the room. Scarcely two sentences were devoted to himself. In an age when Clinton-imitating pols ache to cull the life-shaping events from their past to establish the perfect bio, Dean does none of that. The impact he has on people when he speaks to them is bio enough.
Can this carry -- to swing voters, and into the South? I have no idea. But I do know that Dean's been consistently underestimated, and that there's only one Democratic candidate who's fun to watch.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
