People of the Year 2004: Howard Dean

As 2004 dawned, the democratic party was getting ready to make way for a new political superstar: Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who seemed virtually assured to snag his party's nomination. There was only one small problem: The people who loved Dean didn't live in Iowa or New Hampshire, sites of the first caucus and primary, respectively. And to make matters worse, as he was conceding victory in Iowa, he let loose a demonic scream that made him seem inappropriate for the pep squad, let alone the presidency. Though Dean never seriously contended in any of the succeeding Democratic primaries, he articulated a message -- anti-war, tolerant and fiscally conservative -- that added a dose of common sense to the tired liberalism of the Democratic Party. And it is clearly a message that still resonates -- the new year may see Dean making a run at the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

Why did your campaign flame out so quickly?

I didn't know anything about running for president. We knew a lot about insurgency campaigns, but we weren't prepared to be front-runners.

What about your campaign are you most proud of?

Everybody has copied our use of the Internet and our grass-roots organizing. But the most important thing we did was not copied: We ceded power to the thousands of people who were spreading our campaign across the country.

What would you have done differently in retrospect?

Woulda, coulda, shoulda -- I don't spend time worrying about it.

What about the scream?

It was mangled by television. It was a speech of the kind I gave all the time. None of the press corps who were following me thought much of it, but the cable-TV editors thought it was great to see me making a fool out of myself.

How would you rate the job that the media did covering the campaign?

Pretty awful. Corporate concentration of the media means that news coverage is sacrificed so bottom-line expectations of quarterly growth can be met. We have to decentralize the media again.

Did Democrats underestimate how much voters cared about moral values?

That's just hoo-ha from Karl Rove that the press is lapping up, as usual. The numbers are something like this: Twenty-two percent voted on morality, twenty-one percent voted on Iraq, and twenty percent voted on jobs. How does that make morality the key issue? It's nonsense.

Given the size of the Republican victory, should Democrats try and cooperate with them?

Since when was fifty-one percent of the votes a mandate by anybody's definition? It's ridiculous. We don't have to stand for right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, we don't have to stand for more tax giveaways and bigger deficits.

Are you concerned that voters who feel screwed by the Bush victory will give up on politics?

No. There's a tremendous momentum out there. People want to have hope again. If you lead them and give them a reason to vote again, they will get right back in the saddle.

Will you run in 2008?

I have no idea.

Next: Seymour Hersh