With Iowa and New Hampshire having come and gone, the Democratic presidential primary season is well underway. Candidates are sweeping across the nation, targeting those states where they believe they have their best shot, in a no-holds-barred attempt to win the nomination and get as many delegates as possible. However, at the same time, there is a growing realization and acceptance of who the eventual nominee will be. I know it hurts many of you to hear it, but it is true: John Kerry seems increasingly unstoppable, just as Howard Dean seemed to be roughly a month ago.
So what happened? Dean has gone from being an inexorable force on the prowl into a wild, dangerous animal being backed into a corner in a matter of weeks. Kerry has gone from being the “wrinkly old man” with no chance (along with Lieberman) in this field of fairly youthful candidates to being accused of using Botox to help with his “image.” In a media instant, Dean’s candidacy has died and Kerry’s has been reborn like a phoenix out of the ashes. To those who continue to observe Dean’s campaign, it seems more like a car crash in extreme slow motion: horrific to be sure, but you have to stick around to see just how much damage he can do.
The answer seems simple: Dean slipped at the very end, and people realized what a firebrand he was. Kerry seemed the likely alternative, with his strong military history and his far more moderate policies. However, what may have actually happened is far more interesting. The old seem to be winning with the tried-and-true strategies of American history, and Dean’s little Internet revolution seems to have fizzled into oblivion. Dean’s plummet seems to be a failure not wholly on the part of his message itself: Dean has his followers, and they were not simply statistics created in a Zogby poll. The failure of Dean’s campaign is the result of the exaggeration of his standing by the media in the first place, combined with his reliance upon the Internet and youthful voters.
Major media networks live and die by the numbers: both through polls and ratings. Candidate A goes up a few points, he’s on the cover of all the magazines. Candidate B goes down a few, Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson alike are asking their respective campaign managers why that’s the case the next day. To be fair, it’s an easy way for them to judge who’s “winning,” but it is that very idea of the election being a race, with leaders and followers, that blind the media to being more truthful in their reporting. The media hasn’t been free of this criticism in the past, either: for years political scientists have claimed that the media over-hype elections in order to get better ratings, turning the most important political events into mere mile-makers in a massive horse race to the White House.
Rather than wait for things to become clear, the media seemed to have chosen a victor long before anyone had a chance to vote, and they based it on obviously incorrect polling data. It seems likely now that Dean was never actually the frontrunner in this campaign — the media just made it up. The powers-that-be looked around and were bored by a bunch of uninteresting candidates saying the same things with different terminologies. Faced with such a horrible prospect, they decided to act. The media had created an exciting race where none had existed before by using Dean and his followers to get better ratings.
The second failing of Dean’s campaign lies in his reliance upon the Internet. By and large, Dean’s campaign existed in the hearts and minds of those who followed him, and in little else. College political activists serve political candidates in one respect: to do the grunt work that no self-respecting adult would spend his or her time doing. Handing out fliers, organizing followers to make rallies seem more popular than they are in reality, and so on. It’s not our votes they care about; it’s how we can change the minds of those who do vote that they care for. The Internet is the stomping ground of today’s youth, and Dean capitalized upon its value. The problem was not in utilizing the Internet as a foil to his campaign, but rather in basing its core upon it. Candidates who base their campaigns upon the youth of this country almost always fail, and Dean is slowly learning this valuable lesson.
In some ways, it’s sad. Watching this social and political revolution die out as quickly as it began must be terribly disheartening to Dean’s followers, and my heart certainly goes out to them. However, this is good for America. The only way to learn is by making mistakes. The media failed, and so has Dean’s youthful Internet campaign. By nominating a more centrist candidate instead of the youth-driven leftist Howard Dean, the Democrats will not only be able to put up a better fight against Republicans, but also will improve the overall quality of the debate in general. Sadly for Dr. Dean, his loss is America’s gain.
Zach Stern ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and economics.
