At this stage, Obama has been compared with Howard Dean’s rise to popularity around the same time four years ago. I remember this very vividly. I followed Howard Dean from the beginning of his rise. I seriously mean all the way through. But, I feel that the comparisons between Obama and Dean are slightly off base. I think the reason behind the comparison between the two has to do with the fact that they were both portrayed as media darlings that are possibly overrated. So, I wanted to give my insight into the whole situation based on the differences between their campaigns.
First I’ll list the similarities. Both of them were certainly getting lots of attention in this phase of the campaign. Maybe because it was a reelection campaign for Bush, but Dean didn’t seem to get lots of attention before March. It’s only February, but Obamamania began in January already. But anyway, it’s been very early for Obama, just like Dean. They both have the role of being an outsider candidate. Dean was governor of a minor state, and Obama is less than a one-term senator. Both of them have/had a reputation for wanting to get outside the typical democratic talking points. They have always tried to get outside of the typical processes.
So think about the differences…
I remember the beginning of the Dean campaign. It was a very youth-driven process. At the time, a candidate like Dean was considered very outside the mainstream, definitely an outsider, and also a bit less than diplomatic with his choice of words. Obama, on the other hand seems to be quite different in that his campaign isn’t very gimmicky. Dean’s popularity and attention seemed to be based on the fact that he used a blog. Ooooh blogs! Well, this time around, there really aren’t any new technological tricks to be exploited, as all candidates seem to be hip to the high-tech approach.
Basically I feel that the attention that Dean received was based, in a large part, on his new approach to campaigning, while Obama is receiving a lot of attention based on the fact of his ideas alone.
I’d almost say it’s the opposite. Dean attracted a lot of young liberals, both through his “netroots” style and through his liberal politics. I remember being excited at the prospect of an honest to god liberal in office.
Obama’s appeal is based partially on the excitement of a Black man as prez, but mostly on his personal charisma. People say that they appreciate his sincerity and positivity, but what they really mean is that he comes off more like a Frank Capra hero, and less like a sleazeball. His actual politics are secondary.
And I say that as someone who plans to vote for Obama, at this junction.
Obama’s always been an appealing candidate, and there’s always been an undercurrent to him that suggested that he was going to run for president sooner or later. Soon after Obama’s election to the Senate, my mother, a lifelong Republican and western Pennsylvanian, said she’d like to vote for Obama. (She also said she liked Edwards, too. And swore she’d never vote for Hillary Clinton.)
The fact is that most of a candidate’s appeal doesn’t have anything to do with his or her ideas but how he or she comes across. Voters are drawn to some unmeasurable quality that surrounds a candidate. Maybe it’s charisma; I don’t know. Dean had it through 2003, but things fell apart, and I don’t think it was his famous scream. There was just something about Dean that didn’t click with people. We tend to forget that on the day Dean did his scream, he’d just come in fourth place in the Iowa caucuses—hardly a promising sign for any candidate. Dean was already showing that he didn’t have sufficient appeal to snag the Democratic nomination, much less the presidency. Me, I’d spent 2003 supporting Dean, and even campaigning for him, but by January 2004 I’d started to have my doubts. I realized I wasn’t so enamored of Dean when I heard him say in an interview that he can’t get his message across because the media are biased. That’s Republican-style whinging, and I couldn’t respect him once he started falling back on such pathetic tactics. My falling out of love with Dean probably started before then, but that was the last straw.
Obama is different. He’s had national attention since the 2004 election, and people living in and outside Illinois have long talked about him as a presidential candidate. Obama is taken more seriously by more people than Dean, and Obama has less work to do to get his name out there than Dean did. The notion that Obama has any novel appeal for being the first viable black presidential candidate is ridiculous; I’m sure there aren’t enough people out there who are willing to vote for a candidate just because he’d be the first black president. Or the first East Asian president. Or the first female president. The dominant attitude is that one needs more to go on. Personally, I haven’t ruled out voting for Obama, but I’m currently leaning toward John Edwards.
I disagree that the novelty of Dean’s style of campaigning is what drove his campaign. The appeal came more from the fact that in 2003, we were still being told regularly that to criticize the president was tantamount to treason, and Howard Dean was the first politician to come along and say, boldly and loudly, that George W. Bush is screwing things up. It felt good to hear that! The fact that Howard Dean wasn’t the strongest candidate didn’t bear out until people actually started voting. He got most of his attention by saying things that a lot of people needed to hear but that too many politicians were afraid to say. These were scary times. I told a friend of mine that the “war” on terror was a sham and not actually a war, and he screamed at me, “You’re not even an American!” I’ve been an American all my life, and sure, we almost came to blows over that, but my point is that the Bush administration had whipped up so much unhealthy fear that a lot of otherwise reasonable people were prone to act really really crazy. Dean, with his courage to finally sling rocks at Goliath, was the first audible voice of sanity coming from an elected official. God bless Howard Dean for this crucial work.
I remember watching his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, and saying to my wife, “this guy’s gonna be President someday.” Even though I’m pretty much in the Edwards camp right now, I’m starting to get that feeling of inevitability about Obama - I think ‘someday’ is probably going to be ‘January 20, 2009.’
There’s no question that our media gatekeepers really didn’t like Dean, but one function of starting off our campaign season in the retail-politics states of Iowa and New Hampshire is to give candidates a chance to bypass the Heathers of the media, and take your message directly to the people.
In Iowa, Dean was unable to capitalize on that opportunity. And while “the scream” undoubtedly hurt him in NH, he’d been governor of VT, right next door, for just about forever, so he should have had a reservoir of familiarity to overcome a single bad moment like that. Plus presumably he’s spent lots of time in NH too in 2003. None of this was enough to help him. Dean’s campaign died because while the nascent netroots may have been behind him, that didn’t mean a lot of people in any one place could be persuaded to support him.
It’s a wash at best, and probably a net detriment. There are still a lot of whites who won’t vote for the most ‘articulate’ black man in the world, and since the Dems are already getting 90% of the black vote, there’s only so much room for compensatory gains there.
The one group where this sort of ‘first’ might make a difference is Hispanics. They lean Dem overall, but it’s still more like a 60-40 split, so the first Hispanic nominee has a chance to rake in millions of votes that would normally go to the other party. If Richardson had Obama’s charisma, this thing would be so over.
I completely agree with this. What drove Dean’s campaign during 2003 was the underserved market of people who thought Bush was full of shit, and that the Iraq war was a mistake from the get-go.
The Web was simply an ideal means of connecting with that group, as those two beliefs are the identifying characteristics of the lefty netroots, both then and now. It had little to do with novelty, and almost everything to do with finding a channel of communication that matched up extremely well with his political base.
The Web is still not an area that politicians (or their campaign managers) understand all that well, across the board. It’s still ‘new’ in the sense that a lot of pols, campaign operatives, reporters, pundits, etc., who became established in their fields before the Web became anything like what it is, just plain don’t ‘get’ what’s going on out here - it’s still amazing how many people who make their living in those ways see the lefty netroots as a perpetual Two Minute Hate, with Bush in the Emmanuel Goldstein role.
Someone out there (possibly Bowers or Stoller over at MyDD) was talking about Nixon in 1960 the other day. Television had been around through most of the 1950s, but there was no one in Nixon’s inner circle who ‘got’ TV enough to sit him down, make him take the day off before the Kennedy debate, and insist on his putting on makeup for the cameras. It took the 1960 loss to get that message through. So I think some campaigns are going to make much better use of the netroots than others, or even get into new territory (e.g. Facebook) that isn’t even ‘netroots’ in the sense the term’s been used during the past four years.
Obama as a pol is extremely different from Dean. There are several ways of trying to appeal to a majority of the electorate, and three of the main avenues are visible in the three main Dem candidates this year. Edwards’ approach, like Dean’s four years ago, is to clearly define his side over against the opposition, with the goal of doing so in a way that makes his side the more appealing. Hillary’s approach is to move to the center, with the goal of picking up more moderate/independent votes than she’ll lose in the way of base/wingnut votes. Obama’s approach is one you don’t see all that often - he’s attempting to transcend the divisions in our society. The reason you don’t see it often is that you either need to be very, very good, or have a very pliant media, to pull it off. In 2000, Bush’s “I’m a uniter, not a divider” (remember that?) schtick (barely) worked because of a pliant media that gave Bush’s positions and history only the most cursory examination, while examining Gore down to the color of his suit and his exhalations of breath.
Obama, OTOH, is very, very good. When I’ve got more time, I’ll try to come back and give a few instances of just how this is, other than that he’s a gifted speaker.
Yes, I’d like to add a bit more here after having read RTFirefly’s response:
Obama is very different in a lot of ways, but is getting compared to Dean due to his high prominence so early in the cycle. Although I kind of feel that it’s not too early nowadays. Crazily enough, Vilsak had to drop out already. That must be some kind of record for a serious candidate (not Larouche!). But on to Obama…
He seems to be able to play the media extremely well. They really can’t go around and play gotcha politics with the skeletons in his closet to the degree that they did with Bush. He wrote about his drug use years ago in his first book. That’s open, and definitely not a secret. What screws a lot of people when confronted with this gotcha tactic is they are automatically put on the defensive. Dean did okay with this. Everyone loved Dean for his no-nonsense approach. He’d call something crazy if that’s the way he felt, but the media would come back and spout some kind of “Some people say that your lack of tact in expressing your opinions could affect your percieved sense of electability, how do you respond?” Those faceless claims kind of killed him.
I can think of a few good Obama moments. One was when he was running for Senator. In the end, Alan Keyes was brought in to run against him after something happened to the first guy. I can’t really remember the specifics, but at some point, during a debate, I believe Keyes said that he wasn’t religious enough, to which Obama replied that he was trying to be Illinois’ Senator, not its preacher. This is a great example of how he defuses criticism based on dividing tactics. I don’t know whether he plans these comebacks, but they certainly quash these gotcha tactics that really force so many candidates into positions that they don’t really like.
Finally, Dean received a lot of attention because of something, essentially negative. “He’s saying what we’ve been dying to hear! The president is an idiot!” Obama is getting lots of attention for being what we’d all like our politicians to be, on the left at least. We’re sick of them being forced into being “centrist” which really means pandering to the middle by supporting things that they believe everyone is supposed to care about. How idiotic was it for Kerry to do all of these tough guy photo ops? Riding his motorcycle, skiing, biking, playing football…Democrats are often thought to be soft, and not manly, etc, and this “I’ll prove I’m not!” attitude isn’t working. “Check it out! I’m a normal guy! I may talk like a seasoned washington politician, but I’m just a normal guy like you! These photos prove it!”
After Fox tried to skewer Obama, he simply cut them off. That was great, because, to win the democratic primary, he doesn’t need their viewer base. Let’s call a spade a spade, Fox is biased and everyone knows it. They’ve recently played another gotcha moment to the hilt, revealing that he had a “dirty little secret” in that he used to be a chain smoker. What a pathetic thing to talk about really. “He quit smoking for the campaign!”
But Obama seems to be very adept at controlling the message so far. I just get the feeling, that like all of my favorite candidates ever, he’ll get torpedoed at some stage for not being electable enough or not having enough experience, when all I really want is a guy who will take some risks in office to make America better. That’s how we ended up with Kerry, who lost. What’s crazy about this is that it’s the media taking things that aren’t necessarily true and making them reality. “Some are worried that Obama doesn’t have enough experience” “Some say that Dean isn’t electable enough!” This will obviously influence the public based on a non-existent group of people’s worries (especially regarding Dean’s electability, which is a stupid issue that cost him the nomination. “Dean might not be electable? Oh shit then we shouldn’t vote for him,” said the voters of Iowa. Just an idiotic thing. But luckily, this time we’ve got a great crop of candidates. Richardson, Edwards and Obama are fine by me. I don’t like Hillary
black man in the world, and since the Dems are already getting 90% of the black vote, there’s only so much room for compensatory gains there.