US Diary: Hillary vs. Howard - the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party

HILLARY CLINTON V. HOWARD DEAN
The Grudge
by Thomas B. Edsall

During a recent appearance on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart asked Howard Dean about his controversial "50-state strategy," under which the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is allocating significant resources to parties in red states as well as blue ones. How many states, Stewart wanted to know, do critics of Dean's strategy want the Democrats to focus on? Dean replied, "If they had their choice, probably one--New York."

If that was a shot at Hillary Clinton, consider it retaliation. Even before Dean took over the DNC in February 2005, Washington-based Democratic operatives, some aligned with Clinton's presidential campaign, tossed around the idea of trying to sideline Dean in 2008 by creating a position called "general chairman" and appointing Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell to fill it. The putsch was quickly abandoned--Dean had built too much loyalty among the DNC's 447 members to make the plan viable--but Clinton's backers remain determined to prevent a man they view as a loose cannon from undermining their bid for the White House.

The result? Dean and Clinton--the Democratic Party's two power centers--find themselves locked in a struggle for intraparty supremacy. Each camp considers the other's political strategy fundamentally flawed. Dean loyalists dislike Clinton's stance on Iraq and her cautious approach to leadership, and they also fear she is too polarizing a figure to win a general election. Meanwhile, Clinton partisans doubt Dean's competence in managing the DNC and believe him to be just the sort of antiwar, elitist, left-wing Democrat who will scare off white middle- and working-class voters.

What makes the Dean-Clinton struggle so interesting is that it represents an inversion of the party's previous power structure. When Dean began his rise to national prominence in 2003, he portrayed himself as an insurgent who would challenge both the Democratic Party's Washington establishment and the ideological legacy of Clintonism, which he argued had pushed the party too far to the center. That tactic once looked likely to propel Dean to the Democratic nomination. But, today, Dean heads the DNC, and it is Clinton who wants her party's nomination. To win, she will have to make inroads among Dean's followers and loosen his grip on the party's apparatus. This time, it is the Clintons who are the insurgents, but insurgents who represent the Democratic establishment.

The schism between the two camps has its roots in Dean's early 2003 discovery that running against Clintonism held a lot of appeal for Democratic primary voters. Many liberals were hungry for a politician who would tell them what they wanted to hear on Iraq, gay rights, and the role of religion in American life--and, just as importantly, one who would denounce Democratic triangulators, equivocators, and compromisers. On all those counts, Dean delivered. During his presidential campaign and later in his 2004 book, You Have the Power , Dean offered a forceful critique of Bill Clinton's centrism. "After nearly a decade of widening income inequalities, campaign-finance scandals, noxious inside-the-Beltway compromises, and political catfights ... the American people felt equally disenfranchised by Democrats and Republicans," Dean wrote. He added, "The Democrats have made a fundamental mistake in watching Bill Clinton and thinking it was his strategy--and not his extraordinary personality--that enabled him to do all the things he did." He continued to press this theme while running for DNC chair, but, instead of citing either Clinton by name, he simply lashed out at the Democratic establishment. "Here in Washington," he said, "it seems that every time we lose an election, there's a consensus reached among decision-makers in the Democratic Party that the way to win is to be more like Republicans." Dean's alternative was simple: "The way to rebuild the Democratic Party is not from the consultants down, it is from the ground up." Such rhetoric continued even after Dean won the chairmanship. This spring, Dean told a group of reporters, "We don't really have any consultants. ... We try to do everything in-house. We don't have a stable of Washington consultants telling us what to do."

That's not exactly true. Dean hasn't done away with consultants; he has replaced consultants loyal to Clinton with consultants loyal to him. Dean spent $2.7 million on political consulting fees during his first 18 months at the DNC, substantially more than the $1.7 million former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe spent in the first 24 months of his tenure, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. The major difference lies in who is getting contracts. Under McAuliffe, between January 2001 and December 2002, Harold Ickes's firm received $122,000; Peter Hart and Associates got $131,000; and the Mellman Group, headed by pollster Mark Mellman, got $111,000. All are Democratic loyalists from the Clinton years. Dean, by contrast, has brought in a consulting network dominated by one company, Blue State Digital, which was started by four former Dean workers immediately after the 2004 campaign. Dean's DNC has so far awarded $664,000 to Blue State, another $254,000 to Blue State founder Ben Self, and $137,000 to co-founder Joseph Rospars.

While Dean was distancing the DNC from Clinton loyalists, his allies in the blogosphere were attacking Hillary Clinton on both ideological and political grounds. To her adversaries, Clinton's positions--especially on the Iraq war--prove that she lacks the authenticity, strength, and heart to stand up against the GOP, the religious right, or corporate America. "We literally hold her, and what she represents within the world of progressive activism, to be responsible for the massive progressive backslide that has taken place over the past twelve years," wrote Chris Bowers of the blog MyDD . In The Washington Post , Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos called Clinton "a heartless, passionless machine, surrounded by the very people who ground down the activist base in the 1990s and have continued to hold the party's grassroots in utter contempt."

Now Clinton's camp is seeking to change this landscape. Its strategy appears to be twofold. First, it is laying the groundwork to circumvent the DNC in the event that Clinton wins the nomination. Her advisers see Dean as a maverick, and they want to depend on him as little as possible during the general election. "The DNC is going to be peripheral," says one Clinton strategist. "We are going to have our own field staff, starting way before the primaries begin, right through November 7." He points out that she is prepared to reject public financing during the primaries and the general election. (Clinton does not lack for money: She has raised $32.2 million for her Senate reelection and has $22 million in the bank--all transferable to her presidential campaign, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.) This would allow her to keep the field staff she develops during the primaries on her payroll during the general election--instead of shifting it to the DNC, as previous candidates have done. Plus, in a move widely and correctly interpreted as a rebuke to Dean, Clinton strategist Harold Ickes recently established a private voter database to compete with a similar database being built by the DNC. Ickes's move--as well as Clinton's formidable array of experienced advisers, including Terry McAuliffe, Howard Wolfson, James Carville, Mark Penn, and others--will give Clinton added independence from the DNC.

Second, Clinton and her operatives have begun working systematically to fracture her online opposition. Perhaps the most noteworthy step in this strategy was her July 4 announcement that she would endorse the winner of the Connecticut primary, ditching Joe Lieberman if he fails to capture the Democratic nomination. Clinton's announcement seemed calculated to win plaudits on the Web--and it did. "Good for Clinton," wrote Duncan Black of the blog Eschaton . "She should get a lot of credit for coming out and making this announcement," wrote blogger David Sirota.

Clinton's move had traction on the Web in part because it came on the heels of a June 25 announcement by blogger Peter Daou that he had been hired by Clinton's Senate campaign as a consultant. In a farewell note on his Salon -based blog, Daou said he was "joining Senator Clinton's team as a blog advisor to facilitate and expand her relationship with the netroots." The acquisition of Daou, engineered by Clinton strategist Wolfson, was preceded by the hiring of the lesser-known Jesse Berney, who ran blog operations for the DNC during the 2004 campaign and who was the online mobilization coordinator for the afl-cio in 2005. The Clinton campaign, according to Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network, is "going to try to master [the blogosphere] the way the Clintons have mastered all other aspects of politics. My prediction is they are going to be very good at this."

When talking about blogs, Clinton's advisers now sound conciliatory notes. "The bloggers are passionate, engaged, informed members of the party who deserve to be treated seriously and taken seriously," Wolfson says about a constituency that has denounced Clinton as a sellout, a stooge for corporate America, and the leader of an elite Democratic cabal determined to silence the party's base. "Blogs have earned a seat at the table," says Clinton pollster Penn.

So who will win the showdown between Howard and Hillary? In both the long term and the short term, the odds favor Clinton and her allies in the party's more moderate wing. Take the long term first. Many of the troops brought into politics by the Dean campaign are desperate to turn their avocation into a paying profession. Many left-wing bloggers are struggling to survive financially and would love to begin earning salaries as political operatives. For instance, Bowers and two friends, Hale Stewart (aka "bonddad") and David Atkins (aka "thereisnospoon"), recently announced the creation of NetRoots Research, Strategy & Analysis. As bloggers like these enter the competition for consulting contracts and campaign jobs, the pressures of the political marketplace will likely work to moderate idealism--and to make compromise and accommodation more acceptable within the netroots.

In the short term, Clinton's strategy of dividing and conquering the blogosphere will be abetted by the nearimpossibility of Web-based Dean loyalists uniting around a single candidate in 2007. Zack Exley--formerly organizing director for MoveOn.org, an Internet specialist on the Dean campaign, and director of online organizing and communications for Kerry-Edwards 2004--puts it this way: "I think Hillary is going to surprise everyone with the netroots. Every candidate who is flirting with the idea of running is trying to do it like Dean did it. You could have ten candidates trying to be the insurgent dark horse. All those candidates are going to split the netroots, leaving Hillary to be the standout." The netroots have simply become too large to be the exclusive agent of any one candidate. With her front-runner status, Clinton doesn't need to actually win the blogosphere outright; she just needs to make sure no one else does. And odds are there will be no repeat of 2003, when the liberal blogosphere rallied overwhelmingly to one contender.

That, in the end, may be Clinton's biggest advantage in her battle with Dean. Of course, there is always the possibility that Clinton will falter. But, if she does not, then Dean, with his supporters unable to coalesce behind a single candidate, will likely find himself without a proxy to run against her. Then again, he may not even want one. After all, there is probably only one candidate Dean could ever truly back, and he is sitting out this race. His name, of course, is Howard Dean.

(Thomas B. Edsall is a special correspondent for The New Republic.)