So...

Since everybody knows I've been supporting Howard Dean, I've noticed lately that a lot of people seem to be waiting for me to say something about the dissolution of his campaign. I haven't had much to say because the whole thing has been so disappointing and infuriating that it just puts me in a bad mood to think about it too hard. But now that it's officially over, I suppose I ought to say whatever it is I have to say and get on with it.

The end of this, the "First Internet Campaign" has seen a lot of internet soul-searching and internet post-mortems, and there are a number of analyses of what went wrong that broadly capture my own feelings. Still, if you want to know what I think happened and how I feel about it, well, here's what I think happened and here's how I feel about it.

I think Dean lost Iowa fair and square. They sent a bunch of volunteers in there who didn't know how to work a caucus and so they screwed it up. This was a mistake that reflected the nature of their outsider campaign; sometimes insiders know stuff you need to know if you want on the inside too. The Gephardt/Dean ad wars probably didn't help, but I doubt they made as big a difference as the mainstream pundits claim. In any case, Dean lost Iowa because he deserved to lose Iowa.

He didn't deserve to lose New Hampshire, however. In different times, his loss in Iowa wouldn't have meant anything to New Hampshire voters, who have shown a willingness in the past to ignore the judgement of their midwestern brethren. He lost New Hampshire, in my view, because of two factors he did not control: the sheer terror of Democrats nationwide at the prospect of seeing Bush (re)elected, and the determination of the mainstream press to assassinate his candidacy.

Democrats are scared about a second Bush administration, and I don't blame them. The prospect of Bush making Supreme Court appointments is enough to make we wake up screaming at night. The arbitraryness of the Bush v. Gore decision and the gutless passivity of Democratic "leadership" only heightens a sense of powerlessness that exacerbates that fear. The result is that most Democratic primary voters don't give a shit who their next president is, as long as it isn't Bush. Thus, the "electability" criterion: people are making their primary voting decision based on who they think other people will vote for. I could write pages on why this is a mistake, but I'll leave it at this – beyond some very broad generalizations (Al Sharpton, for example, was never gonna be president) it is an impossible calculation to make to get inside the head of a mythical national voter averaged over class, race, gender, geographic location, education level, etc, and try to gauge who this nonexistant model voter would find appealing. The very act of trying to make this judgement was bound to obscure our own emotional reactions to a candidate which are, ironically, probably the best predictors of who other people would vote for.

And this is how the trap was set. Long before the fateful Iowa concession speech, the mainstream media had been developing a narrative of Dean as "unelectable." Before I go any further, let me be perfectly clear about something:

There was ABSOLUTELY NO objective reason why Dean was less electable than any of the other Democratic candidates. None.

But not if you listened to any of the talking heads on TV and radio. Dean was unelectable because he was too liberal. Because he was too conservative. Because he was too angry. Because he was too nice to gays. Because he was anti-war. Because his supporters were too white/young/educated. Because he was from Vermont. Because doctors are arrogant. Because Vermonters are hippies/yuppies. Because he was "unstable." Because he "shot from the hip." Because he was dishonest. Because he told the truth too much. Et cetera. The biggest thing all these reasons had in common was that they were all demonstrably, obviously untrue to anyone who was paying attention. To those of us who knew Dean up close from his time as governor of Vermont, the "liberal" tag was laughable; one of the things I liked about him early on was that he was, like me, a little too conservative to be called liberal but a little too liberal to put up with conservatives. Silly me, I actually thought this would make him more, you know, electable. But really, all of these characterizations were laughable.

Since we all knew already that Dean was angry and unstable, the Iowa concession speech could only be seen as proof. Why else would someone holler like that? Because he was trying to be heard in a very noisy room, perhaps? Because he was trying to pump up a room full of shocked and disappointed supporters? Because the audio signal we heard played hundreds of times in the next week was fed directly from his directional mic? No, no, no. It's obvious. He must be crazy.

One of the saddest parts about the whole thing was that I wasn't hearing this from my conservative family members. I was hearing this from my liberal friends, educated people who were paying attention to the race. What they weren't paying attention to was how they were being manipulated by the media, and how their own decision making was being twisted against their purposes. They were relying on a professional class of media political analysts to do their filtering, and didn't realize they were being swindled by those same professionals.
In the end I hope that this will be one of the upsides of the Dean campaign: a lot of people who got emotionally involved in the campaign had their attention drawn, in a memorably painful way, to the power and corruption of mainstream media filters. Maybe some of those people on Dean's activist list will be not only more sophistcated consumers of news media, but will help to spread the word. Being a loyal reader of the Daily Howler, I already have an appreciation of just what a bitterly ironic joke it is when people claim that the media has a liberal bias. But most people don't, and this is one of so many examples of how Republicans have been far more effective at shaping appealing narratives than Democrats have. I hope Dean's figurative assassination is a wake-up call for Democrats. I also hope that the experience that all those Dean supporters had with the organizing and communicating power of the internet will be the beginning of the end for establishment media. I still have a "Kill Your Television" bumper sticker on my car, and now I mean it more than ever.

As for how I feel, well, I feel like crap. A familiar kind of crap, unfortunately. The same kind of crap I've felt like during every other presidential campaign as I anticipated casting a lesser-of-two-evils vote. It was pretty exciting for a minute there to think that we might actually have a president who was one of us. Kerry will certainly be an improvement on Bush. But "not unbelievably awful" isn't the same thing as "good."