Dean rebounds

Lest anyone forget, Dean’s main objective in going to Iowa was to knock out Dick Gephardt. Now, granted, he did it by coming in third rather than coming in first, but still: Gephardt is now gone.

Unfortunately, Kerry and Edwards stole his thunder, so Dean is no longer running as an outsider but as an insurgent. As Cole Campbell points out (via Channel Dean):

Howard Dean took refuge in the only safe haven for failed front-runners – reclaiming his year-ago status as underdog. “If you had told me a year ago that I was going to finish third in Iowa, I would have been delighted,” he told Larry King. Kerry cast himself as “Comeback Kerry,” positioning himself as the Seabiscuit of American politics, front-runner and underdog rolled into one pint-sized horse with heart.

The candidates are trying to reposition themselves in the idiom of the press, capitulating to pressthink’s assignment or roles and expectations in order to improve their standing in the eyes of the press or to induce the press to transmit and reinforce this new positioning to prospective voters. But they never blow the whistle on the press’s centrality. […]

[…] The press tells itself that it is not implicated in the politics it molds and shapes. It presents itself as a campaign innocent. But everyone involved knows better.

I’m not convinced that Dean is finished. Yes, he took a beating in Iowa, but I’m seeing a fair amount of evidence that that was due to:

1. A war of attrition between Dean and Gephardt, which Kerry and Edwards could rise above and gain brownie points in a State that traditionally dislikes negative campaigning. This war is now over.
2. The shallowness of Dean’s organisation: lots of out of state volunteers and first-time voters, but not enough savvy and/or training required to sway caucus groups one at a time. The next few elections are primaries.

Also, he’s going back to the positive “the situation is dire, but it doesn’t have to be like this” message that enamoured many people, including me, to him in the first place.

A quick look at the front page of his blog should be enough to convince you of this.

First of all, one of my favourite Howard Dean ads, the biographical / what he did as Governor 60-second ad, is prominently featured. Secondly, Dean has come out with a bold, comprehensive plan to revitalise democracy in America which has the same “he’s talking about this; I hope he mentions blah soon - yes! he did!” feeling as when I first heard him talk about the environment, and he mentioned all the wilderness areas of the US that could be used for renewable energy.

Howard Dean first started really talking about campaign finance reform when he decided to decline public funding, and it was only fair for his rivals to accuse him of opportunism and hypocrisy. They said that by opting out of public funding he was endangering public funding as we knew it; he said that he was getting his private funding in small donations, and was the embodiment of campaign finance reform by not being beholden to special interests or moneyed doners. While agreeing with him at the time, I would have agreed with you that it wasn’t a clear-cut issue. With today’s further statements on democratic reform, I believe he has made his position completely snark-proof.

Consider the major elements of today’s plan:

1. Favour small donations.
   • Legislate and campaign to increase the pool of federal funds available to candidates.
   • Make small donations tax-deductible.
   • Make a $100 donation is as good as a $600 donation, by multiplying matching funds by 5 for small donations.
2. Blunt the effectiveness of boatloads of cash.
   • Limit the attractiveness of opting out, by allowing more expenditure for candidates accepting matching funds, and giving them finances to match those candidates who opt out.
   • Make public funding a blanket yes/no choice: prevent candidates opting out for the primaries but opting in for the general election.
   • Require TV and Radio to provide time for political broadcasts.
   • Extend public funding to House and Senate elections. (Weakness: Governor races - important because most recent Presidents have been Governors - are not counted.)
3. Go further: remove some of the obstacles to true modern democracy.
   • Make the FEC and a new agency in charge of redistricting fully independent.
   • Require a paper trail for electronic voting. This is a pretty much a bipartisan issue that mostly the Democrats are talking about, so it’s cheap and easy, but it needed to be said.
   • The punt: we’ll establish a committee, of “real people”. The chance: Dean is actually talking about not just Internet voting (which is comparatively tame), but such radical thing as the abolition of the electoral college and instant runoff voting.

I want to expand on a few points.

Free or cheap party political broadcasts: there are two potential threats here. The main threat is scheduling and TiVO: people know when the political slots are, and they change channel / don’t watch. The secondary threat is that, if advertising professionals don’t think these slots are worth much, the ads won’t be that good, which will make even fewer people pay attention to them. (We have this problem in the UK, and especially in France - the UK is spared somewhat because it imports political consultants from the US 4 years after their most successful election, rather than their French-speaking imitators 8 years later.) I think this measure is going to be useful for the next two or three elections, and will then wither, neglected, on the vine as elections are fought on another battleground - e.g. the Internet.

Independent redistricting is vitally important. If you make redistricting the job of a fully independent agency, as we have in the UK, the issue of what the constituency boundaries are effectively goes away. (In France, conversely, Socalists, Communists and Greens alike still remember, if they’re old enough, the 1996 Pasqua boundary redécoupage.) It’s like the BBC: you know they’re doing well when both Labour and the Tories hate them. The UK Boundary Commission has been independent for long enough that if the party in power tries to stuff it with their cronies there would be a horrendous outcry; if a Dean administration can take boundary redistricting off the table for a term or two, it will be very difficult to go back to partisan gerrymandering. (Gleefully I note that the wikipedia entry for gerrymander also mentions the Tullymander.)

As for the more radical ideas, punted to a committee, well, they have the potential to shake up the entire system. Although I note that Dean didn’t mention section 527 organisations (the cynic in me thinks that’s because the Democrats have a fair number of those; the optimist suggests that’s because we don’t know what the impact of McCain-Feingold is going to be until we have a major election under these new rules.)

An instant run-off system, similar to the French system with a first ballot where you vote according to your heart, and a second ballot where you vote according to your head, would preserve a two-party system but allow other parties to emerge briefly during the initial ballot (and lend national legitimacy to further attempts to gain local and state mandates). But the abolition of the electoral college has the potential to completely turn upside-down US politics.

On the face of it, it makes sense: Gore beat Bush by more than 500,000 votes in 2000, despite the presence of a third-party candidate on the left (Ralph Nader), and arguably had Florida stolen because of a) the ineffectiveness of the butterfly ballot, which lead thousands of voters to mistakenly vote for Buchanan rather than Gore; b) the excessive disenfranchisement of voters who vaguely looked like felons; and c) had the recount in Florida not been stopped, Gore was getting closer to winning anyway.

But all of this is irrelevent if you get rid of the state-by-state winner-takes-all system. If all that matters is the national share of the vote, then campaigning suddenly changes. And, crucially, if individual states no longer matter so much, then suddenly the primary campaign changes as well.

The Democratic party’s new primary rules have already dealt a major injury to the existing primary system: OK, so Howard Dean may have suffered some press backlash for having come third in the Iowa primary, but he nonetheless has 7 delegates to Kerry’s 20 and Edwards’ 18. Only another 4000-odd to go, then. Iowa means nothing except when it comes to momentum, i.e. what the fickle press think is the current talking-point.

See the beginning of this post for someone else’s choice thoughts on the press’s perverse influence on this election.

My only major dissapointment was that he didn’t mention something he mentioned before, which is that ex-felons (note: not current felons) should, having served their penance, have the right to vote. This is, on the face of it, a given, but it’s so easy for Republicans to pigeonhole that I can understand why Dean decided to duck that particular issue for the next few days. Still, I’d like to see him address it. Soon.