The Dean Legacy

This article is about campaigning strategy and lessons learned from the Dean Campaign. In particular how those failures can be uses to build a strong campaign.

Ari Berman

Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is required reading in a class that Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, teaches at Northwestern University. If the Obama campaign naturally understood what Dean was trying to do, even though Dean's candidacy ultimately fizzled, the Clintons did not. "They looked at '04 and said, If Howard Dean lost, those tools must not have worked," Trippi says. He cites Clinton's unwillingness to compete all-out in red-state caucuses as a main reason her campaign is in such a predicament. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos dubbed Clinton's approach--and subsequent discounting of her losses in red America--the "insult 40 states" strategy. While the Obama campaign prepared for the long haul, Clinton poured most of her resources into a few key early states, expecting to have the nomination wrapped up by Super Tuesday. "It's not a very long run," Clinton predicted in late December. "It'll be over by February 5."

Whoever wins the nomination would be well advised to keep Dean around through the general election. More important than the money he can raise is the consistency he represents, among the netroots and state party activists. "If the Clintons or anyone came in after winning the nomination and said, 'Thank you, Howard. You can go now,' it would be a very divisive and fractious fight," says one Dean adviser. "That's the last thing they'll need."

Because of the small number of Congressional battlegrounds in '06, strategists in DC like Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel could at least make a persuasive case against the fifty-state strategy. But this fall, because of the vastly expanded number of competitive races, they'll have a much tougher brief. With contested Senate races and statewide contests (redistricting happens in 2010 and '11) in addition to a presidential election, many more states will be in play, strengthening the logic of the fifty-state strategy. "The tone and temperature of this argument will be diminished compared to '06," says Joe Andrew, 1991-01 chair of the DNC and a Clinton supporter. "There will be enough money to go around."

 

Rest of the article can be found at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/berman/3