This diary entry has the alternate title of "A Dream Interrupted at Its Music."
At first, I really couldn't figure out why the political blogs, the media and the Democratic Party are still obsessed with Dean.
He bowed out, he went to a soccer dinner on the night of the Super Tuesday elections, most of his staff is gone and everything else is in hiatus until he can get his own group going in a couple of weeks.
It seems clear that, on a personal level, Howard Dean has left the building. Howard Kurtz's Washington Post article this last week and a similar one the week before in USA Today spotlighted his campaign as one being, well ... pointedly ordinary ... with your typical run-of-the-mill gaffe-prone organization led by people whose egos often put them in conflict with the goals of the campaign itself.
And yet the post-mortems, the CNN specials, the handwringing in the opinion pages continues.
So, what is the problem here?
We've all signed our loyalty oaths, given a five-spot to John Kerry, migrated our energies over to Democratic Party Meetups and the DNC/DCCC/DSCC blogs.
Why hasn't the dialogue moved on?
My guess is:
We all got stopped short. No, not just on the level of Howard Dean's defeats in Iowa and in New Hampshire. We got stopped short on something that really only marginally had to do with Gov. Dean.
We got stopped short on taking care of the business of revitalizing the Democratic Party and it happened because the business of defeating George Bush was so urgent that primary voters did not want to take a risk. That risk was running an unknown, firey former Vermont Governor against what we know will be the best-funded and least ethical presidential candidacy in history.
The media never knew who Howard Dean's core supporters were. We were not pot-smoking college kids. We were not hippies, social drop-outs, pie-in-the sky Nirvana dreamers. I don't even think of myself as a Progressive, although I know some other Dean supporters do.
Maybe this is because we found it hard to characterize who we were ourselves. But when I read something posted on Daily Kos by NYCO or PaulDem or others, I see my own sentiment in their words and know that there is something common that brought us together that I'm not sure I can describe.
Remember early 2003? I was among the many people out there who were scouring the Internet for information, for an organization and for a candidate who I believe who stridently and passionately stand up to what I saw George Bush doing to our country.
We were like a huge mass of energy unleashed, obsessively clicking the refresh button on sites like Eschaton and Daily Kos, trying to somehow connect with all of the information about the economy and about the Iraq War that the media stubbornly refused to provide. We waited with baited breath for the next Krugman article. We despaired as our party leadership voted with Bush on taxes for the wealthy and a unilateral (yes, it was one) invasion of Iraq.
Howard Dean did not start a movement. He did not come to us and organize us and turn us into a political force. The force was already there. We discovered him, we made his campaign and we made his candidacy because we thought he had the best chance of furthering our goals.
But our goals and our dreams were interrupted by something that we did not predict: Our energy incited a wildfire of passion among Democratic voters. Our disappointment, anger and fears about what the Bush Administration was doing to the country percolated down to their level, out through the grassroots and into the constituency as a whole.
Once we convinced the mainstream of the peril that the Bush Administration presents to our nation, defeating Bush became their top priority. Revitalizing the party, they thought, can wait for a time when the danger has subsided.
So, now we have John Kerry. I find him just about as exciting as a paving stone. But he's safe and he's experienced and he has no trouble "doing what it takes" to win an election. I believe he will be our next president. I am prepared to soak his campaign in cash and do whatever it takes to get him elected.
But our dream of revitalizing the party, the dream interrupted, lives on. Don't tell us that we need another unity movement, another unity event, to "get over it," to "get on message" or whatever. Despite the popular paranoia, Dean supporters are, overwhelmingly, going to get out the vote for Kerry in November.
But the dialogue, the "Dean Dialogue" or the "Change for America Dialogue" or whatever else you want to call it is not going to go away until the business of revitalizing our party is completed.