Refried Dean: why the Democratic front-runner is more like Bill Clinton than George McGovern - Winning Back America - Book Review

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Stephanie Mencimer

Winning Back America By Howard Dean Simon & Schuster, $11.95

No story about Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean these days seems complete without the obligatory quote from some Democratic Party insider that Dean is, simply, unelectable. Whether it's his support for civil unions while governor of Vermont, his opposition to the war in Iraq, or his vow to represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party"--a shot across the bows of party centrists--detractors say Dean is too liberal to win the hearts of swing voters in an evenly divided nation, and could even provoke an electoral debacle comparable to George McGovern's 49-state loss in 1972. Indeed, those sharing this view run from the Democratic Leadership Council, whose leaders blasted Dean in a memo last May as the candidate of the "McGovern-Mondale wing" and the "elitist, interest-group liberalism," all the way to McGovern himself who, The New York Times reported in November, sees in Dean's candidacy "echoes of his own." But reading through Dean's new book, Winning Back America, one begins to sense that it is another former Democratic candidate who has left the deepest imprint on Dean: Bill Clinton.

It's true that, on a purely biographical plane, Dean and Clinton have little in common. Clinton was a meritocrat who began life as a poor white kid in Arkansas with an alcoholic stepfather and ended it as the first Democrat to win a second term since Harry Truman. Dean is an East Coast brahmin with a privileged upbringing which he doesn't even bother to attempt to minimize. His story starts in a tony Long Island suburb, and he writes frankly about his family of achievers and his time in prep school and then at Yale, where he loafed around as an unfocused student, conceding that he's no Horatio Alger, but making up for his lack of childhood poverty by asserting that he was born thrifty. (You've probably already heard how cheap he is, and how he still wears a suit he bought at J.C. Penney for $125 in 1987.) We also find a few interesting personal revelations, such as his decision to become a teetotaler after getting married. (He hasn't had a drink in 22 years.) By far the most compelling is Dean's description of losing his brother, who was kidnapped and murdered by revolutionaries in Laos in 1974. Dean traveled to Laos in 2002 to visit the site where his brother's body was thought to have been buried and worked with a bucket brigade that was excavating various sites looking for POW remains. He writes that the experience diffused his longtime anger at his brother, whom he realized had been seduced by a beautiful and beguiling country.

Yet it's telling how much of the book consists of rebuttals of his critics, many of whom see Clinton as the only possible model for a presidential success in 2004. Dean goes out of his way to hype his college classes in international relations and his travels to 50 countries to shore up his foreign policy bonafides--an inoculation against George W. Bush's executive experience, of course, hut also a reminder that Clinton's presidency raised the bar for Democratic candidates' experience and interest in this area. To counter criticism that he can't personally connect with black voters--one of Clinton's great strengths--Dean protests, perhaps too much, "I had two African-American roommates my freshman year."

Then there are Dean's criticisms of his party, which bring to mind Ralph Nader's and are often taken by Dean-watehers as a direct criticism of Clinton himself. "With a strategy of always moving to the center, always sounding like Republicans, Democrats have made it possible for George W. Bush to move so far to the right he's become the most radical president in our lifetime," Dean argues. "By being afraid to stand up to the Republicans and their radical agenda, the Democrats have actually empowered the radical right. We've voted for the Republican agenda half the time in the belief that this somehow allows us to straddle the place where the votes are. But I don't think the voters want George W. Bush's policies. I don't think they want me-tooism, either"

But once you've moved on to the second half of the hook--which is almost pure policy paper--Dean's critique of "me-tooism" begins to feel like a rhetorical sop to the liberal activists who have flocked to his campaign from the start. Here, one becomes reacquainted with the centrist positions that defined Dean's governorship, from his fierce advocacy of balanced budgets to support for gun rights. The section which discusses how the Bush administration has shifted the tax load from wealth to labor is lifted straight from the playbook of Dean's rival Sen. John Edwards's (D-N.C.)--a playbook largely written up by centrist policy experts affiliated with the DLC. (It's also worth noting that Dean's book makes no mention of an issue that has been of so much concern to his fellow physicians over this last year, medical malpractice reform. This is perhaps wise, given that Dean has of late been courting the doctors' nemesis, trial lawyers, as a source of campaign funding.)