Here is the text of an article from the New Republic, that describes the retaliation against Dean supporters going on inside the Democratic Party. (I've simply included the entire article, rather than a link, so you don't have to pay). Someone suggested to me last night that the public defections of campaign staff are an attempt to get back in the good graces of the Dem Party leadership. It reminds me of the Maoist purges. Here's the article...feel free to comment.
***************************************
DEAN'S SUPPORTERS FACE RETRIBUTION.
Oops!
by Franklin Foer
(by subscription only)
Post date: 02.12.04
Issue date: 02.23.04
With John Kerry cruising to victory, these are supposed to be healing days for Democrats, when they embrace old adversaries and apologize for
vicious attacks launched during the primaries. But now that Howard Dean has fallen, some in Washington can't resist kicking the corpse one last time. Last week, I called Ivo Daalder, an alumnus of Bill Clinton's national security team, at his Brookings Institution office. And, while etiquette might dictate that Daalder lavish praise on the vanquished candidate, he spent our phone conversation critiquing Dean's foreign policy. In Daalder's view, the Vermont governor's positions on Iraq range from the facile--"bringing into [Iraq] one hundred thousand Muslim troops that don't exist"--to the self-destructive--"I didn't like that he criticized the [Democrats] senators who voted for the eighty-seven billion dollars. We can't get things right in Iraq without the funding."
What makes this rebuke of Dean's foreign policy particularly odd is that Daalder was himself a primary architect of that policy. It was Daalder
who helped draft the speech Dean delivered at the Pacific Council for International Policy last December, outlining his approach to national
security. In foreign policy interviews Dean gave to The Washington Post and The New York Times a day before that speech, Daalder sat by the
governor's side. Similarly, it was Daalder who presided over a question-and-answer session at the National Press Club, when the Dean campaign unveiled its foreign policy team. According to one of his Brookings colleagues, who watched a procession of high-powered Democrats traipse to Daalder's office to pay respect to Dean, "Ivo was The Guy."
In the wake of Dean's unraveling, however, Daalder is promoting a revisionist history of the campaign, where his status is downgraded to
something significantly less than The Guy. "My position is that I'm happy to advise anyone." He pauses before adding, "I don't have a central role, and I never did."
Why is Daalder backpedaling so furiously? Because he understands that he could suffer payback for his Deaniac days. Dean, after all, famously took aim at Washington politicians, at one point referring to them as "cockroaches." And the feeling was largely mutual. Many in the
Democratic Party establishment felt the Dean campaign represented the unmaking of Clinton's political legacy--a return to the days when the
party failed to package its policies for mainstream consumption. Despite this, when Dean established himself as the front-runner, some Washington Democrats followed Al Gore's lead and jumped on people-powered Dean's bandwagon anyway. Thirty-five congressional Democrats endorsed him before Iowa--more than endorsed any other candidate--caucusing regularly at California Representative Zoe Lofgren's house. Similarly, several dozen pro-Dean lobbyists congregated weekly in the conference room of
power law firm Hogan & Hartson. "You had a lot of people on K Street joining right before Iowa," says lobbyist Toby Moffett, a regular
participant in the meetings. "They wanted to attach themselves to a winner."
But Dean turned out not to be a winner. And now, those Democrats who resisted Dean's anti-establishment revolution are enjoying full-fledged schadenfreude at the expense of their pro-Dean colleagues. "Is [Tom] Harkin still dancing around?" asks one Senate aide, referring to his lively stump speeches on Dean's behalf. The anti-Deaniacs particularly enjoy the irony that Carol Moseley Braun endorsed Dean--and received a $20,000-per-month travel stipend from his campaign--just as it was forced to put its workers on a pay holiday. "Let's hope she asked for the money upfront," jokes one.
Officially, the Kerry campaign pledges to bring the party together and to move past such gloating. But some establishment Democrats, both
inside and outside the Kerry campaign, still intend to punish the Dean heretics. And, while well-known politicians, such as Gore, Harkin, and
Moseley Braun, may endure the most public abuse, the people who may ultimately suffer explicit retribution for their Dean-boosting are cogs
in the Democratic machine--people like Daalder, who toil in think tanks or union leadership or groups like the Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC). As one former high-ranking Clinton administration official puts it, "Will they work again in this town again? I hope not."
Start with the foreign policy wonks. In most campaigns, the wonk is a lonely, unwanted figure who places calls to campaign headquarters in the
hope that he'll be allowed to add a paragraph to a position paper that will only be read by fellow wonks. For the Dean campaign, by contrast,
collecting Washington wonks was a matter of necessity, a way to add gravitas to a campaign identified with bloggers and aging hippies. This
was particularly true on foreign policy, where Dean had no public experience. As a result, the Dean campaign's pursuit of foreign policy
experts was remarkably aggressive. According to one Democratic insider, Dean sent emissaries to the house of former State Department spokesman
Jamie Rubin on three separate occasions, in addition to courting Rubin personally. It wasn't just the marquee names that got this treatment.
Dean also assiduously wooed less well-known Clintonites. "It was just weird how much effort they put into this," says an aide to another
candidate.
By the time Dean began assembling his national security team, though, most of the Democratic foreign policy establishment--which is now
heavily clustered at the Brookings Institution--was already quietly committed to the Kerry, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards campaigns (in the
case of some wonks, all three at once). Without the party's A-list names, the Dean campaign began searching for advisers in less glamorous
quarters. For their foreign policy rollout, they signed up former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and former national security
adviser Tony Lake--veterans of Clinton's first term. But, in Democratic circles, Clinton's first term is widely considered a low point in the party's foreign policy, and, in any case, Christopher and Lake weren't substantive advisers. So, last fall, Dean recruited two mid-level Clintonites from Brookings for his day-to-day needs, former Director of European Affairs at the National Security Council Ivo Daalder and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice.
For many in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Dean was seen as dangerous. They worried that his strident opposition to the Iraq war would revive old clichés about the party's pacifism and that his claim that Saddam Hussein's capture did nothing to enhance U.S. security would prove fodder for countless GOP ads. No one was more concerned on this
score than Daalder's Brookings colleague and occasional co-author, Michael O'Hanlon, who penned scathing op-eds in The Wall Street Journal
and The Washington Times attacking Dean. O'Hanlon, who advises several of the candidates--including Kerry--told me, "More Democrats should have recognized [Dean's] danger and spoken out against him." Within Brookings, O'Hanlon's pieces were seen as a direct assault on Daalder
and Rice and a break with the institution's genteel mores. One Brookings fellow describes them as "just bizarre. Forgive me, but that was
personal, not professional." Others at the think tank reported witnessing loud, uncomfortable hallway arguments between Daalder and O'Hanlon over Dean.
At the time, Dean was still riding high, and--O'Hanlon's attacks notwithstanding--so were Daalder and Rice. But now that Dean is done,
Rice and especially Daalder may find their career prospects also dimmed. When I spoke with the foreign policy gurus who would likely stock a
Democratic administration, they seemed to regard the Dean campaign as a debilitating black mark on one's resumé. It doesn't help Daalder that he
took an aggressive posture during Dean's glory days. Instead of privately conceding his candidate's foreign policy shortcomings, Daalder
defended him to the hilt. "After Dean delivered the line about Saddam's capture, Ivo was quite animated in defending that sentence," says one
Brookings fellow. And, as a former Clinton administration official told me, "If you're a policy adviser, you exist to stop lines like that from being delivered. And, if it gets delivered over your objections, you have an obligation to fall on your sword. This whole campaign causes me to question [Daalder's and Rice's] judgment."
As Kerry's consolidation of power continues, rancorous debates over the Dean campaign will probably disappear from the hallways of Brookings. But that doesn't mean that those disputes will be forgotten. One fellow
at the Brookings Institution accuses Dean's foreign policy advisers of "contributing to a [campaign] that could have helped their careers but hurt the party." It doesn't look like Brookings will be regaining its gentility any time soon.
Another case of Howard Dean buyer's remorse was visible on the front pages this week, when Gerald McEntee, the head of the American
Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (afscme), yanked his union's endorsement of the former front-runner. The newspapers described afscme's withdrawal of support as a sign of the Dean campaign's impending doom. And it is certainly that. But it may also be a sign of McEntee's impending doom.
Over the last 15 years, McEntee acquired an almost mythic reputation within the labor movement for shrewd political judgment. When most of labor rallied behind Harkin's 1992 bid for the presidency, McEntee bucked his comrades and embraced long-shot Bill Clinton. During the 1995 campaign for afl-cio president, McEntee did more than anyone in the movement to install the underdog John Sweeney. And, in return for these
gambles, in 1996 he was rewarded with the mother of all afl-cio appointments: head of the federation's political education committee, a
position that placed him in charge of labor's multimillion-dollar voter-turnout operation.
At the beginning of last year, McEntee set out to play kingmaker once again. While the industrial unions were trying to rally the afl-cio around longtime ally Richard Gephardt, McEntee was fawning over Kerry. In February, McEntee told the Associated Press--and any other
publication that would listen--that "Kerry would have the best chance" of overcoming George W. Bush's wartime glow. But, when the Kerry
campaign lost its early luster last spring, McEntee began searching for a new horse. The next object of his affection was Clark. When McEntee invited Clark to his union's L Street headquarters for a meeting last July, the general hadn't yet decided to fling his hat into the race. But McEntee likes to flaunt his machinations to the press. According to
labor officials, without warning Clark, he invited a scrum of reporters to surprise the general with microphones and cameras as he exited their tête-à-tête.
McEntee's flirtation with Clark, however, was as short-lived as it was public. The abortive nature of their romance apparently had less to do
with the merits of the general's candidacy than with the internal politics of the labor movement. McEntee's chief rival within the afl-cio is Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees Industrial Union (seiu), whose membership rolls have grown in recent years thanks to its
recruitment of government workers who had traditionally joined afscme. Long before Dean emerged as a viable candidate, Stern had praised the Vermont governor for his emphasis on health care, seiu's defining issue. As the Dean campaign caught fire last summer, Stern and his left-leaning rank and file moved toward endorsing him. And this, in turn, spurred
McEntee to action. "The prospect of Stern taking the spotlight for himself pissed the hell out of Jerry," says one Washington labor official. So, McEntee countered Stern's impending endorsement by quickly moving afscme behind Dean, too.
By backing Dean, McEntee and Stern were explicitly rejecting Gephardt. For months, the industrial unions had been campaigning for the afl-cio to endorse the former House minority leader. Their attachment to Gephardt was deeply personal--union organizers in Iowa wore i gave my
blood for gephardt pins--but it was more than that, too. "If you don't stand behind a guy who's been with you for more than twenty years, how are you going to be able to convince other politicians to take risks on your behalf?" asks one afl-cio official. Thanks in large part to McEntee and Stern's dissents, Gephardt's allies failed to win the two-thirds vote of afl-cio's member unions necessary for an endorsement. It didn't help McEntee and Stern's standing within the movement that the Dean and Gephardt campaigns collided head-on in Iowa, in effect requiring afscme and seiu to go to war against the industrial unions backing Gephardt. Nor did it help that the ensuing nastiness between the campaigns knocked Gephardt into fourth place--and out of the presidential race.
But, while Gephardt supporters in the industrial unions hold both McEntee and Stern responsible for their candidate's demise, they largely
give Stern a pass, because seiu's endorsement was the result of a vote by its left-leaning executive board. McEntee is not so lucky. Not only did he personally make the executive decision to endorse Dean, his grounds for doing so were viewed as hypocritical. Last May, McEntee told Roll Call that he wanted a candidate tough on national security, going
so far as to praise Joe Lieberman for coming out "stronger, stronger and stronger on the issue of Iraq and terrorism." But, when he cast his support with Dean, he gave exactly the opposite rationale for endorsement, praising Dean for his consistent opposition to the war.
"[Dean's] position on Iraq, when it wasn't sort of a favorite thing to do, took a tremendous amount of courage," he told CNN's Judy Woodruff in November. Such flitting from candidate to candidate--Kerry to Clark to Dean--and rationale to rationale, made his motives look dubious at best. "It was clear that he made his decision for entirely Machiavellian reasons," says a Senate Democratic aide close to the labor movement.
There's another reason McEntee could pay a higher price than Stern. McEntee is chairman of the afl-cio's political committee, and,
therefore, in a position to be punished. Although this is an appointed position--and Sweeney won't easily abandon McEntee, whose members provide crucial support for his presidency--some of the industrial unions are considering mounting an orchestrated movement to pressure Sweeney to dump McEntee nonetheless. In McEntee's stead, some of the industrial union leaders have suggested that Sweeney install Harold Schaitberger, the head of the firefighters' union--and one of Kerry's most stalwart supporters. "During a presidential election, do you want your top political guy to be Jerry after he threw Kerry over the side
like that? What kind of message does that send?" asks one labor official. Schaitberger doesn't deny that some of his comrades have been
touting him as McEntee's replacement. "Jerry is a friend," he told me diplomatically. "He's brilliant, but he can be very forceful. It's fair
to say that he invokes strong feelings." When the afl-cio executive council convenes next month at the Sheraton Bal Harbour in Miami, those
strong feelings could conceivably force McEntee from office.
Over the last 20 years, there have been few things the labor movement and the centrist DLC have agreed upon. But Howard Dean's implosion has
brought the protectionist unions and the free-trade-loving DLC together on at least one thing: their disdain for pro-Dean heretics in their
midst.
Though Dean was a certified New Democrat during his years as governor of Vermont, his presidential campaign practically baited the DLC into attacking him. Dean identified himself as the champion of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party"--implying that the DLC, and
centrist Democrats in general, were quasi-Republicans. Last May, Bruce Reed and Al From, the president and chairman of the group, struck back in a high-profile memo: "What activists like Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an aberration: The McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home." Dean used the DLC counterpunch as a pretext for escalating his rhetoric further, explicitly denouncing the group as the
"Republican wing of the Democratic Party." His aides began mockingly referring to it as the "Disappearing Lieberman Campaign."
Yet, even as Dean launched these attacks, he accomplished a stunning coup: He managed to pry a handful of DLC stalwarts away from their
ideological home base. Three of the elected officials on the DLC's "New Democrats to watch" list--Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, Arizona State Senator Ken Cheuvront, and New York City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz--defected to Dean. In December, New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey endorsed him, too--a painful loss given that recent electoral defeats in the South had left McGreevey as one of the most prominent New
Democratic governors. Months earlier, Ted Mondale had joined the Deaniacs. Walter's son and a former official in the Jesse Ventura
administration, Mondale had been trumpeted by the DLC as a symbol of how the centrists had wrested a younger generation of pols from the grasp of paleoliberalism. More painful still was the apostasy of Simon Rosenberg, head of the centrist fund-raising group the New Democrat Network, who remained neutral in the race but spent the fall and winter defending the
Dean campaign against the DLC's charge that it represented resurgent McGovernism.
But the most painful defection of all was that of Harvard Professor Elaine Kamarck. Kamarck had made her name in the 1980s as a wonk on the
staff of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the DLC's in-house think tank. During the '90s, she served as Gore's domestic policy adviser, overseeing his reinventing-government initiative, the quintessential Third Way program. Kamarck had been one of the prime
explicators of the DLC's electoral strategy. In 1989, after the Michael Dukakis debacle, she co-authored an essay for PPI called "The Politics
of Evasion": "Liberal fundamentalists argue that the party's presidential problems stem from insufficiently liberal Democratic candidates who have failed to rally the party's faithful," she wrote. "The facts, however, do not sustain this allegation." But, over the course of last fall, Kamarck became one of Dean's most vociferous
defenders in the press, culminating in a January column in Newsday endorsing Dean. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out, this
meant embracing a candidate whose electoral strategy she had debunked 14 years earlier. (When I asked Kamarck about the inconsistency, she replied, "Well, the nation's changed. We're living in a fifty-fifty electorate. You can win elections with an excited base.")
Kamarck's colleagues won't bash her on the record. But, with the protection of anonymity, they turn harsh. One ex-Clintonite says, "This
town is famous for its opportunism, but it's a terrible mistake to turn on your friends and join someone else's bandwagon." Another prominent
New Democrat complains, "As we criticized Dean, Elaine rushed in to blindly defend him."
For the elected officials who endorsed Dean--like McGreevey or O'Malley--it's hard to calculate whether there will be long-term costs.
Some aggrieved colleagues suggest they have potentially damaged their reputations in the eyes of the DLC-friendly network of donors and
perhaps could lose access to the p.r. services that the DLC performs by trumpeting politicians in its publications and conferences. But, for
Kamarck, the costs are much clearer. According to New Democrat sources, it is unlikely that she'll be invited to speak at centrist Democratic
conferences or to write in the New Democrat journals that have been her prime stage for the last 20 years. "How can you think of her the same
way again?" asks one Democratic wonk.
This may explain why Kamarck is now trying to distance herself from Dean, just like Daalder and McEntee. She now argues that she "stopped
just short of endorsing Dean"--not the impression one would get from the column she wrote last month pronouncing Dean "the strongest candidate against Bush that the Democrats have." But it may be that you really can't go home again. When I mentioned some of the derisive comments made by her New Democrat colleagues, she showed just how thoroughly she had
internalized Dean's anti-establishment message. "That's stupid Washington bullshit," she said. And there was one other response she
wanted to share with her erstwhile friends: "Fuck 'em."
In official statements, the Kerry campaign echoes the conventional wisdom that Democrats are too consumed by their desire to beat Bush to
spend much time hating one another. They predict a Democratic Party lovefest in Kerry's big tent. "Put on your lipstick," the Democratic
strategist Donna Brazile told me. "There's going to be a lot of kissing going on." But many of the policy types who would likely assume top
positions in a Kerry administration still hope to punish the opportunism of the erstwhile Deaniacs. "It's going to be hard to forget," says one Kerry adviser.
Still, Brazile is basically right. The Kerry campaign isn't brimming with hatred. In fact, many in its ranks feel a certain empathy for the
Deaniacs. After all, many of Kerry's advisers signed up for his campaign in early 2003, thinking they had hitched themselves to the clear
favorite in the race. Then they watched for an entire year as Kerry's numbers sank and sank. Ed Kilgore of the DLC, a Kerry adviser who helped
write the candidate's book A Call to Service, says he was subjected to merciless ribbing. "People treated you like you made a calculated decision to sign on with the front-runner--so you got what you deserved." During Kerry's months in the wilderness, Kilgore's comrades in the campaign sunk into depression, discussing their post-campaign career options and jokingly comparing their candidate to Edmund Muskie, another derailed front-runner from New England. "It was a miserable, lonely time," says Schaitberger. Then, after Kerry's Iowa win, his
fortune reversed again, and, in the blink of an eye, he went from also-ran back to front-runner. As one Kerry aide puts it, "I always stick out campaigns and lose. This is the first time I have ever benefited from patience." Perhaps there is still hope for the Deaniacs after all.
Franklin Foer is an associate editor at TNR.