We are pleased to introduce Michael Tomasky as a regular online columnist. His pieces will appear at TAP Online every Wednesday.
Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) was the winner by TKO of the first major Democratic beauty pageant, held at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters over the weekend. "He just blew those people away," said Joe Klein on Face The Nation. "It was one of the most effective speeches I've ever seen a candidate give." Klein has seen a speech or two in his life and tends to choose his words with analytic care, so if he says it, it's believable. Besides, virtually everybody else is saying the same thing.
But Dean's approach is already being misinterpreted by the major media in a way that both misses the point of his burgeoning appeal and sets him up for certain future dismissal. Dean won an enthusiastic response at the DNC klatch on the basis of his "fiery and unabashedly liberal message," wrote Dan Balz in The Washington Post. "Unabashedly liberal" is, of course, the key phrase there -- it's a code that in the synapses of Washington insiders involuntarily leads to other words and phrases such as "unserious," "entertaining, but" -- and, ultimately, "unelectable."
I'm not saying the speech wasn't unabashedly liberal, or that Balz was necessarily wrong to characterize it that way, given the conventions of newspaper writing. But to see Dean's appeal to hard-shell Democrats as chiefly ideological is to miss entirely what's important about his presence in this race. His appeal is mainly emotional. He is telling beleaguered party loyalists -- sick to death of counting up their party leaders' wretched misjudgments and capitulations over the last two years -- that here is one Democrat who wasn't a part of that train wreck and who just isn't afraid of Republicans. This is why Dean matters. When he says, "I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," there is, to be sure, an ideological element to it; but it's a phrase laced with far more electricity than ideology.
Pundits and experts don't see it this way because they only know how to interpret things ideologically -- Dean is positioning himself to the left of this one and the right of that one. The ideology-is-everything lens can lead to some silly assertions, such as The New Republic's recently offered opinion that Dennis Kucinich's (D-Ohio) entry into the race "leaves Howard Dean without a constituency" (because Kucinich is also anti-war and quirkily conservative here and there). This would be spot-on true -- if the two were both pieces of paper rather than human beings. One was a governor, from whose ranks presidents are always elected; the other is a congressman, from whose ranks presidents are never elected. (Bonus trivia: Last congressman elected directly from the House to the White House? Answer below.) One looks like a president; the other looks like he's auditioning to play Paul McCartney in the stage production of A Hard Day's Night.
The Democrats have a lot of problems these days, and Howard Dean -- who still needs money and still needs to build his profile -- may not prove to be the answer. Earlier this week, a robust debate was raging on www.democraticunderground.com as to whether he was the genuine article. My impression of Dean is that he is a liberal-leaning but pragmatic executive whose medical training has made him more of a task-oriented problem solver than a dreamer anxious to uncork the next New Deal. If he's going to get the media to take him seriously, he has to put that Dean on display alongside the fire breather, and maintaining the balance between the two will be a challenge.
But first things first. What ails the Democratic Party right now is psychological: It is a party of fear and helplessness, and all the "major" candidates, with their vast Washington experience, are, to one degree or another, culpable for the state the party is in. To loyal Democratic voters (if not to pundits), they all have the stamp of humiliation and defeat on their brows. Dean, by contrast, bears no responsibility for the shape his party is in, and by not being in Washington, he has not learned to be afraid of the right wing. And learning -- or rather unlearning -- that is step No. 1 in the 12-step program the Democrats need to undertake.
WHILE NO ONE WAS WATCHING. On the President's Day holiday, Dean delivered an excellent foreign-policy speech -- specific, full of purpose and logical intention -- that can be dismissed as dovish only if you believe that desiring some measure of multilateral support before going to war makes one the moral equivalent of Neville Chamberlain. (You can read the speech here.) Multilateral, in Bush's Washington, has become a dirty word, despite the fact that most Americans consistently support multilateralism. I wonder how these same Americans would regard the news that last week, during a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, the Bush administration unilaterally shot down a long-sought agreement to allow poor nations to buy pharmaceuticals at cut-rate prices. (In December, TAP Online published this piece about how the United States continues to prevent poor countries from buying generic AIDS drugs, privileging the interests of pharmaceutical companies over the lives of Third World patients.)
The WTO's 144 member nations had agreed in Qatar in 2001 to loosen patent laws so that poor countries could buy cheap versions of pharmaceuticals capable of treating a broad range of diseases. Last December the Bush administration backed out. Guess which industry donated $60 million to the Republican Party in the last elections? After a stink was raised by member nations, Bush trade rep Robert Zoellick offered a "compromise" that was, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "essentially a unilateral implementation of the American negotiating position." And the reason I quote the Journal? It was the only major American newspaper to cover the story.
U.S. embassies are receiving "urgent and disturbing" messages, reports The Washington Post, about how hated Bush is becoming overseas. You don't say. When the next round of WTO talks commences in Mexico -- yet another offended former ally -- this fall, and the Bushies don't change their position, the meeting, and maybe the whole WTO structure, will explode. Lord knows there are problems with the WTO, but one of those problems is not that it's just one more pesky group of international Venusians getting in the way of red-blooded American Martians. But that's increasingly how the world is being divided.
I GOT YER ANSWER RIGHT HERE. James Abram Garfield was a sitting congressman when he was running for both the Senate and the presidency in 1880. Garfield won both and of course chose the White House, probably not least because the job paid a staggering $50,000 at the time, which is equivalent to more than $850,000 today. Kucinich may take comfort in the fact that Garfield was from Ohio.
Michael Tomasky is a political columnist for New York magazine.