Joe Klein attends a Dean Meetup in New Hampshire

blm

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Tue Nov-11-03 09:50 AM
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Joe Klein attends a Dean Meetup in New Hampshire

and came away with the impression it was a "cross between a Rotary meeting and a 12-Step program. This is pretty much the same impression I have about the Dean campaign.

Dean and his campaign have made the entire primary about PROCESS and the horserace and few creative policy discussions. Most of the legwork on policy came from other camps. The other candidates crafted policy proposals and delivered them to not much fanfare from the media.

Some of you dislike Klein, and he has given some reason for that....he tends to be brutal....however...Klein is a master wordsmith and knows "trickery" when he hears it.

http://www.time.com/time/election2004/columnist/klein/article/0,18471,538907,00.html
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Dean tricked out his speech—a prepared text, delivered indifferently—with references to the power of the special interests and the need to clean house in Washington. But no amount of populist cant could disguise the fact that the speech was about process, not ideas. Indeed, Dean's whoosh of a campaign hasn't featured very much creative policy thinking. Think about it: Apart from his early stand against the war in Iraq, what has distinguished Dean's candidacy from that of the other Democrats? The propellant for the Dean surge has been almost all style and process—the Internet successes; the monthly Meetups; his stirring, plainspoken pugnacity; the joyful abandon of his campaign—and the sense of community he has aroused in his supporters.

After the Cooper Union speech, I attended a Dean Meetup at a restaurant in Manchester, N.H. It was a cross between a Rotary meeting and a 12-Step program. Attendees were encouraged to share their tales of life in the political desert before Howard came along, their experiences converting others to the cause, and their dreams for a Dean presidency. They organized phone trees, door-to-door campaigns and "visibility" at the town dump. The atmosphere in the crowded room was warm, benign and bursting with righteousness. Clifford Ross, who has been involved in New Hampshire primary campaigns since 1960, said, "I've never seen anything like this in politics." And then he made a more militant point: "It's the difference between Pericles and Demosthenes. When people heard Pericles, they said how well-spoken he was. When people heard Demosthenes, they said, 'Let's march.'"

Dean is not very well-spoken—not, at least, in terms of classical rhetoric—or particularly thoughtful, for that matter. He makes no bones about it. "When people get in my face, I tend to get in theirs," he told the New York Times last week. "I tend to be reflective rather later than sooner." This is not a very presidential quality. Last June, Dean told me that he understood he would have to grow as a candidate in order to succeed, that it was time to move his campaign beyond attacks and anger, to take a run at the vision thing. That lasted about a week. "It's hard to do vision in a crowded field where everyone's attacking you," campaign manager Joe Trippi told me last week. "But we're going to try to address the larger themes of this campaign with a series of speeches starting in a few weeks."

But one wonders about the quality of those speeches. I pressed Dean last week about his proposal for a national dialogue about race. He had talked about the need for white people to understand the impact of racism on African Americans. But what did black people need to understand? Did he plan to go into the inner cities and talk about the self-destructive culture of poverty, as Bill Clinton had? He bristled, of course: "The African-American community doesn't need any lectures from me. That's not my style." Oh, yes, it is—and Dean's future may depend on his ability to slow down, stop hectoring and lay out a vision that shows some deeper understanding of the cultural and substantive differences confronting the nation.