IOWA — Going into this evening’s caucus, Howard Dean has been
slipping in the Iowa polls. Ten days ago he had a nice lead over
Dick Gephardt. Just yesterday, he had fallen to third in a Des
Moines Register poll.
One standard explanation is the gaffe factor, that Dean’s many
misstatements have made a lot of Democrats nervous. Undoubtedly,
that is a big part of the reason. Here’s another: Dean is bit of a
charlatan, and an arrogant one to boot. Some likely caucus-goers,
it seems, are getting wise to it.
On Tuesday, January 6, I followed the Dean campaign around to
what would easily be called events for the upper-middle class. The
first took place at the Summerset Inn and Winery in Indianola, the
second at the middle-class house of Jim Bennau, and the third at
the very upscale house of Ned Chiodo. Chiodo, not incidentally, is
a former Democratic State Representative and now a lobbyist with
clients such as Aventis, McDonald’s, and Wells Fargo. At these
events, Dean usually wore his suit jacket. His manner was low key.
He delivered his talks with none of his famed animation.
Contrast that with the way he presented himself at the American
Legion the following morning. Among a heavily union crowd, Dean had
the suit jacket off and the shirt sleeves rolled up. His speech was
fiery: angry tone, elevated voice, finger stabbing the air, with
his face reddening off and on.
Interesting, isn’t it, that among a crowd that is well educated,
Dean is soft-spoken, almost as though he wants to gently persuade
the people present. But with a union crowd — i.e., lots of people
with nothing more than a high school education — Dean acts as
though he can easily play upon their emotions. And it’s not just
his manner which suggests manipulation. Consider his remarks on
North Korea:
This President is about to allow North Korea to become
a nuclear power because he won’t negotiate with North Korea,
because half of the people in his administration have convinced him
that North Korea is gonna collapse of its own accord. But while
we’re waiting, suppose they do develop a nuclear bomb, and suppose
they sell that to terrorist or other rogue nations in order to get
hard currency while the administration is blockading North Korea.
I’d like to not take that chance because that’s another national
security emergency that we might face that could be avoided now if
we had a president who was willing to negotiate instead of wait
until the last minute and then send troops.
Now, everyone in America not comatose knows that North Korea
already has a nuclear weapon, and was developing one long before
Bush came into office. Apparently Dean was hoping that this
“uneducated” crowd would not be well-informed on North Korea, and
thus he could scare them into thinking that Bush’s ineptness is
letting Kim Jong-il make the world a much more dangerous place. But
it fell flat. The applause was much more tepid than during most of
the speech, and I noticed a fair amount of confused faces in the
crowd. Perhaps sensing that he hadn’t succeeded in pulling a fast
one (not to mention that TV cameras were present), Dean followed up
with an acknowledgment that Kim Jong-il already has nuclear
weapons: “The North Koreans will give up their atomic weapons,
their nuclear weapons if we cooperate with the Chinese and give the
Chinese a signal to make the deal they want to make.”
In fairness, Dean is just like most politicians in that he will
pander to specific audiences. However, Dean has chosen the wrong
way to pander to union members. He has made the mistake of equating
“uneducated” with “stupid.” While most don’t have college degrees,
union members can be quite cagey and skeptical. I suspect they
aren’t overly sold on a candidate giving them a confusing, if not
misleading, message about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.
Nor are they sold on Dean’s inability to let sleeping dogs lie.
During the question and answer period, Dean fired off this gem:
My Democratic opponents and the right-wing of the
Republican Party gave me a hard time a couple of weeks ago after
they caught Saddam Hussein. And I said, “I applauded our military,
‘cause they are the best, and they did a great job, but we are not
safer now that Saddam is caught.” Well, you haven’t heard much
lately since fighter jets are now having to escort commercial
airliners into United States air space. We’re at level orange, and
twenty-three more troops have been killed since Saddam was
caught.
If Dean is so arrogant and insecure that he can’t argue the
Administration is dropping the ball in the War Against Terrorism
without first reminding people of one of his biggest gaffes, what
does that say about his ability to be president? Indeed, Dean came
off like a kid on the playground taunting, “See? I was right!
Nyahh, nyahh!” I wondered how many members in the audience were
thinking the same thing. Again, the applause was tepid, suggesting
they weren’t impressed.
To get a sense of how Dean’s speech went over, I began
interviewing those in attendance. Sitting next to me was Fred, a
retired member of the plumbers and pipefitters union. He was
undecided, but leaning heavily toward Gephardt. He told me that
there “were a lot of undecideds in the unions.”
Next I ran into Don, who had Dean stickers on his sweater.
Surely a Dean supporter, I thought. But no, he was a county chair,
so he was not expressly supporting anyone. When asked if he was
leaning toward any of the candidates, he said either Gephardt or
Dean. He was a former UAW and Musicians’ union member. When asked
if Dean had done anything to win him over that morning, he replied,
“I’m not sure.”
Indeed, of the Dean supporters I talked to, most were not union
members. Typical was Roberta, who worked in management at a steel
plant. Why did she support Dean? “Because he opposed the Iraq war,”
she said. She also liked the fact that Dean was pro-choice and
thought he had the right opinion on the gay issue.
I suspect that this helps explain what is going on with the
polls. At first, the Dean surge — his Internet fundraising, his
sudden leap to frontrunner status due to his opposition to the war
— attracted a lot of upper-middle class Democrats. The resulting
hype translated into support among likely caucus-goers in Iowa. But
now that a lot of caucus-goers, especially the union folks, are
getting to meet Dean, his support is dropping. An arrogant
Northeasterner who talks down to them just doesn’t seem to win
their support.
Whether Dean’s approach will doom his chances to be the
Democratic nominee is anybody’s guess. Yet there are union-heavy
states like South Carolina and Oklahoma just over the primary
horizon. If Iowa is any indication, the Dean Campaign may stumble
some more in the days ahead.
