The Dean Factor

(3 of 3)

Campaigns attract only boutique audiences at this early stage, and the entire field remains largely unknown, even to Democrats. So one question is how well Dean's message will resonate as more people start paying attention; so far, the best he has polled is 12%, compared with Lieberman's 25% and Kerry's 14%. Another is whether the Establishment will try to rally its forces early behind anyone. All nine Democratic candidates will face questions from rank-and-file workers at the AFL-CIO's executive-council meeting in Chicago this week. But the panel appears in no hurry to give its endorsement, which requires support from two-thirds of member unions. Gephardt's long-standing ties to labor give him an edge, and he has already won the support of 10 major unions, including the Teamsters, whose endorsement is expected later this week. But some labor officials suggest privately they could take their support elsewhere if Gephardt doesn't begin to show some momentum.

Dean is taking advantage of this moment, with all its possibilities, to reach out to the party's traditional constituencies. While the crowds at his events are getting more mainstream, they remain largely white. After criticism last week that his campaign was ignoring African Americans, Dean sent the Congressional Black Caucus a letter talking about his record, including his commitment to fighting aids in Africa. "As your nominee and as your President, I will never take the African-American vote for granted," Dean wrote. He is trying to demonstrate that now. His campaign has hired Maria Echaveste, who as Bill Clinton's deputy chief of staff was the highest-ranking Hispanic to serve in the White House, and Christopher Edley, the Harvard Law School professor who headed Clinton's affirmative-action task force.

The excitement factor alone could be enough to make minority Democrats take a look at the brusque New Englander. Dean shows no sign of peaking too early, says Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager and is one of her party's more effective minority organizers. "He's all that and a stick of gum. He's that hot. The flavor has not left him." She mentions a conversation with a prominent bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest African-American denomination. "I've seen all these cats, but I like Dean," the bishop told Brazile. "I've sent him money."

But the backlash has started. "It's kind of like the Mafia," says a strategist for another Democratic contender. "Everyone wants another family to hit him. You don't want to bring blood into your own house." The centrist Democratic Leadership Council (D.L.C.), which helped nurture Bill Clinton's political career, warned last week that the "far left" was taking over the party and pulling it over a cliff. No one had to ask whom the D.L.C.'s chairman, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, was referring to when he posited, "Do we want to vent, or do we want to govern?" Although Dean's record as Vermont Governor defies ideological labels (see following story), it's not that record that matters now, the D.L.C. argues; it's his opposition to the war, his proposal to repeal the Bush tax cut and how he stokes the anger within the party. In a May memo D.L.C. leaders Al From and Bruce Reed planted Dean in what they called the party's "McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home. That's the wing that lost 49 states in two elections."

THE DOCTOR AS GAMBLER
Dean has been running for more than a year, but his campaign did not crystallize into a full-blown phenomenon until the last 10 days of June. It's instructive to look at those days because it is possible to see both the perils and the potential that lie ahead. He repeatedly took risks—from publicly challenging his donors to ante up more money to putting up early ads in Iowa—and showed that what might kill another politician in the big leagues seems only to make him stronger. Even his rather mealy-mouthed performance with Tim Russert on Meet the Press seemed to galvanize his supporters. They bombarded his website with attacks on Russert—and $93,000 in contributions that same day.

For Dean to ultimately succeed, he must win the biggest bet of all: that he is right about Iraq and the economy. If Saddam is killed or caught or if America clearly wins the peace, the Dean case begins to sound badly off-key. And if last week's 2.4% jump in second-quarter growth is a glimmer of a real recovery, Americans may want to hang on to their tax cuts rather than give them up for Dean's health-care and recovery plan. The Dean message that Democrats find so enticing now could be the formula for a Bush landslide.

"You ask me what the pitfalls are, what do we have to do from now?" Dean says. "I think we just have to keep doing what we are doing." It's working, all right. But now that Dean has proved to Democrats that he can stir their passions, there's one more thing he must do: convince them that he can win.