An undisclosed location, Va. — From the outside, the headquarters of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign is completely unremarkable — so unremarkable that passersby have no way of knowing it’s even there. Through the tinted windows of the Arlington office tower where the headquarters is lodged, people shuffling papers can be glimpsed as through a glass […]
Garance Franke-Ruta
Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.
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Trail Mix
The end of an era. A surefire sign that former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) successfully repositioned himself as a mainstream centrist (for at least one hour): A journalist attending yesterday’s local, audio-only transmission of Dean’s third major foreign-policy address, given in Los Angeles, was spotted falling asleep. As the afternoon sun poured into the National […]
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And They’re Off!
Elections are invariably more messy, more contingent, than they may seem in advance, and the coming year’s Democratic presidential primaries are unlikely to prove an exception. Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), who has fervor, volunteers and money to burnand now, with former Vice President Al Gore’s endorsement, has begun to pick up major establishment supportcould […]
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Detroit Pistons
DETROIT — If Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was hoping to focus attention on the problems of his city — or those of urban America in general — by hosting the latest Democratic presidential debate, he must have been sorely disappointed with the event itself. Moderator Gwen Ifill (of PBS) and panelists Carl Cameron (of FOX […]
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Shock of the Old
The smallest crowd of Howard Dean’s Sleepless Summer Tour in late August consisted of about 450 people. They’d gathered at the airport outside Boise, Idaho, on a splash of tarmac surrounded by sparkling, cloudless sky. There, where the crumpled, arid desert gave way to the pine-covered Boise Foothills, amid the mingled scents of jet fuel […]
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Fan Friction
For months they were in on the world’s greatest secret. While other Democratic Party insiders and Internet aficionados toiled for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), they held out hope that retired Gen. Wesley Clark might enter the presidential race. No one paid them much mind. But they hung on Clark’s […]
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Virtual Politics
Retired four-star Gen. Wesley Clark seemed a very appealing fellow to retiree Eric Carbone. “I came out of retirement to work for this guy,” he says, looking up from his computer in an office just around the corner from the White House. Carbone, a member of DraftWesleyClark.com, spent the past two months encouraging Clark to […]
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From’s Last Stand
Al From is quivering with rage. It’s the end of a long day in late July at the Wyndham Philadelphia, and with a sheen of sweat coating his face, he gleams with emotion as he launches into the closing speech of the day at the DLC’s annual conference. It’s a grim speech, delivered in rousing, […]
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Team Spirit
Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) leads the field of nine Democratic presidential candidates in the amount of money he’s raised from people wealthy enough to donate $2,000 each, according to a recent report in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. But the floppy-haired Tarheel has also led the field in another, less heralded area, according […]
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Dean’s Machine
Democracy may be an endless meeting, but on the first Wednesday in June, former Gov. Howard Dean’s (D-Vt.) troops in Washington proved that if you try really hard, you can get it down to about an hour and a half. Around 80 people crammed into Visions Cinema, a movie-theater-cum-lounge on Florida Avenue NW, and spilled […]