This excerpt from
our book is in the chapter "Civil War", which recounts the rise of the new people-powered movement and how its clashes with the party establishment. The chapter starts with the passage of Campaign Finance Reform legislation which suddenly starved the Democratic Party of its main source of dollars -- million dollar contributions.
Suddenly, the Democratic Party is adrift. It has no idea how to replace that cash. The GOP already had a vast network of small-dollar donors. We had no such thing. And it is in that environment that Dean suddenly makes his dramatic entrance into the political scene.
Dean's campaign was an altogether new kind of campaign--it wasn't about offering a list of "policy fixes"; it was more about creating a broad-based populism that energized the base by giving it voice in a national forum, and it was about boldly fighting Republicans, not imitating them. Using tools like Meetup.com, his merry band of bloggers, and the relatively new service unions like SEIU and AFCSME, Dean built an army of foot soldiers that far out-numbered anything his opponents could muster.
Money talks loud and clear in electoral campaigns, and by June 2003 the party establishment was reeling from Dean's second quarter financial windfall--he had raised $14.8 million. Runner-up John Kerry had raised $4 million. The rest languished in the $3-million range or lower. After the election, when he was asked by CNN's Judy Woodruff when he knew Dean had a chance, campaign manager Joe Trippi said: "The end of June 2003, in that unbelievable three or four days when millions came in over the Internet and $829,000 came in on Monday, the FEC deadline day."
That money was all the more remarkable because it was mostly internet-generated small-dollar donations. The Democratic Party had never seen anything like it before. The party, which was struggling to survive because of its gross inability to compete with Republicans on the hard-dollar front (because of McCain-Feingold), was watching a little-known candidate being flooded with exactly the kind of donations needed to build the party.
Dean for America was a fifty-state movement, with over 160,000 people attending decentralized Meetups. Its small-dollar donor base raised $50 million with an average contribution of about $70 dollars. Its volunteer ranks were swollen with netroots and grassroots supporters. The nation's two largest unions were working on its behalf.
[...]
As noted earlier, the 2002 campaign finance reform law radically changed the political landscape. Soft-dollar donations were suddenly out of reach, and with the electoral disasters of 2000 and 2002, the DLC and the establishment in D.C. were at a complete loss. The candidates they favored for the 2004 presidential line-up--like Lieberman and Gephardt--were still living in the 1990s, ill-prepared to operate in this new political terrain where energizing Democratic voters is far more important than sucking up to big-money interests.
None of them understood the growth of this new movement or its sheer size, even as it gathered steam, powering the Dean phenomenon. If anything, the Democratic establishment perceived it as a serious threat. The centrist minds at the DLC had a difficult strategic question to answer heading into the Democratic primaries: How could they keep this new populist movement at bay and ensure a beltway-friendly Democratic presidential nominee? The answer was to redefine these outsiders and the Dean campaign as the new incarnation of the party's now-dead 1970s-1990's liberal wing.
The DLC took point position in the battle against Dean.
Our recounting of the Dean takedown is pretty dramatic, but we'll save that for those who read the book (it even includes insider accounts from DLC strategy sessions). As for the "centrists" at the DLC, what was amazing was how little dirt they had on Dean. There was an intense research effort to dig up crazy liberal statements by Dean during his long political tenure in Vermont, yet they found nothing they could use. In fact, they had endorsed his efforts as wonderfully "centrist" more than once.
Hence, their attacks had to be based on rhetoric and scare tactics, rather than tangible things like "facts". They gave birth to the "unelectable" theme and provided the intellectual framework upon which Dean's critics built their case against him. If only they had been as effective in helping take down Bush.
