The Political Life and Death of Howard Dean

Authored by Michael Pate on January 20th, 2004 at 8:20 AM

I had to think back last night to the Moveon.org Primary. To me, that is where all of this started.

Teagan Goddard offers three excellent reasons for what happened last night. I think the fourth is that Howard Dean appealed to many people at first just because he came across at first as something new and exciting. In 1988, I voted for Michael Dukakis in the primary because of the candidates running, he seemed the most palatable to me. By the time of the General Election, I had found plenty of reasons not to vote for him. What did Howard Dean in was this long campaign before the campaign. It truly benefits the last person to join in, which is why Wesley Clark has been achieving such success.

As for Howard Dean, he tried to run as someone he was not. And it got him further than running as who he actually was. But not far enough. I don’t see anyway he can bounce back from this because he set expectations too high. And it wasn’t the media that was his undoing, it was a high non-machine driven voter turnout.

Links in this entry:

A Message from Governor Dean
MoveOn Primary Prediction
The Real Winner: ABCBSFoxNewsAOL
What Happened to Dean?

Comments

Mm. Actually, polls outside voting indicate that Dean's support was soft across the board except among 18-29 year olds, who thought the Iraq war was the biggest issue. Kerry did well precisely *because* he was able to organize the local machine effectively and use it . This has been acknowledged in political press this morning. Dean's group may have been excited, but the internet world was not able to marshall support among undecideds, who are not connected to the Internet. In the end, it was his low, non-machine driven turnout that wasn't enough.

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