MIAMI—Can we change horses in midstream? Democrats wanted Republicans and independent voters to be asking themselves that question at this stage in the presidential campaign, but with little more than a month to go before Election Day, some Democrats are asking it of themselves. It’s the seven-month itch: The long general-election campaign has led the voters who settled down with Mr. Stability to wonder what would have happened if they had pursued their crushes on riskier but more exciting candidates. What if dreamy John Edwards were the nominee instead of John Kerry? Would he be better able to explain his votes for war and against the $87 billion to fund the war? Would his campaign have been leaner and more effective than Kerry’s multitudes? Or what about Democrats’ first love, Howard Dean? Remember him? Would his straightforward opposition to the war in Iraq look more prescient now than it did during the Iowa caucuses, which were held shortly after Saddam Hussein was captured?
The most surprising Democrat to engage in this daydreaming is one who never dated Dean in the first place: Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic. Writing in Time, Beinart says, “[T]here’s reason to believe [Democratic primary voters] guessed wrong—that Dean would be doing better against Bush than Kerry is.” Deaniacs can be forgiven for being a little bit piqued at the timing of Beinart’s conversion. After all, most Dean supporters thought Beinart’s magazine did its best to torpedo the Dean candidacy for much of 2003, including an online “Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe.” But TNR also ran glowing profiles of Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, and it never married Kerry, either. Although the magazine ultimately endorsed Joe Lieberman, its endorsement issue contained an article praising every other major Democratic contender—Dean, Edwards, Dick Gephardt—except John Kerry. So, it’s understandable why Beinart would be one of the first to fantasize about divorce.
Beinart argues that Dean’s clarity on the war, his straight-talking authenticity, and his lack of a Senate voting record would have forced President Bush to focus on the issue of Iraq, rather than the character of John Kerry. Not everyone who worked for Howard Dean during the primaries agrees that the Vermont governor would have been a stronger nominee—in fact, some say just the opposite or even burst into laughter at the notion—but one senior Dean adviser that I talked to Wednesday agrees strongly. “If Howard Dean were the nominee right now, nobody would be wondering where he stands on Iraq, nobody would be accusing us of not fighting back, and we wouldn’t be fighting to hold on to our base,” said the adviser, who asked that his name not be used. Kerry’s “thoughtful and nuanced positions” might be an admirable quality in a president, but they’re difficult to defend during a campaign.
A Dean general-election campaign would have contrasted Dean’s record with Bush’s in three ways: Dean being against the war versus Bush being for it; Dean’s record of balancing the Vermont budget while providing health care versus Bush’s largest deficits in history with no health care; and a new wrinkle that was only hinted at during the primaries, Dean’s mysterious, infrequently mentioned “tax reform” vs. Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts. Yes, Dean would have repealed the entire Bush tax cut, the senior adviser said, but he would have proposed replacing it with some Dean tax cuts, including the elimination of payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income. The message: Bush cuts taxes from the top down, but Dean cuts them from the bottom up. Why didn’t Dean introduce this during the primaries, when his tax-hiking ways made some Democrats think he would be an electoral disaster, the second coming of Walter Mondale, in the fall? He wanted to wait until after the Feb. 3 primaries because “he didn’t want people to think he was pandering,” the adviser said.
The Dean adviser did go out of his way to insist that he was not criticizing the Kerry campaign. The Republicans “might have destroyed Howard Dean,” too, he said, but “I just think Howard would have matched up differently and better.” The Dean adviser praised Kerry’s maligned convention, which made voters believe that Kerry was a viable commander in chief who was as good as Bush or better on the issues of terrorism and homeland security. “They were in perfect position after the convention to win this thing,” he said, quickly adding that he’s not saying they’ve lost it. But then he added, “They basically are hoping that Bush shits the bed in the debates.”
Of course, it’s pretty obvious that the Republicans would have run a different campaign against Howard Dean than they did against John Kerry. But that doesn’t mean it would have been any less effective. And if Dean couldn’t beat Kerry, what exactly would have made him so formidable against President Bush? Would Dean’s support for civil unions in Vermont have made gay marriage a much bigger issue in the fall? Was there something in his past that we didn’t learn about? Would the aggressive campaign he would have waged in the spring and summer—leaping instantly on every bit of bad news from Iraq, from Abu Ghraib to Fallujah—have backfired? Would Dean have been able to build a campaign that brought together his divided Vermont and D.C. factions? It’s impossible to know, though divining that impossibility is exactly what Democratic primary voters charged themselves with this time around.
Falling in love with Dean all over again ignores what made Democrats fall out of love with him in the first place. An incomplete list: his infuriating stubbornness and refusal to admit mistakes; his lousy white-background TV ad in Iowa; and his shift from a straight-talking, budget-balancing, health-care-providing Vermont governor to the shrieking leader of a cult movement. In Iowa, Dean’s poor showing was exacerbated by the fact that he was the second choice of no one. He and Kerry found out that in American democracy, it’s better to have a large number of people barely tolerate you than to have a smaller number like you a lot. By the weekend, it will be clear whether Kerry managed to rally a nose-holding majority to his side at Thursday’s debate. If not, expect to hear a lot more conversations like this over the next 33 days.
