Dr. Dean’s House Call

Paul wasn’t the only “good Democrat” throwing such a party last week. On December 30, the night of Paul’s “Wing Ding Pizza Thing for President Dean,” there were some 1,443 Dean house parties across the country, and an estimated 22,000 party-goers. The highlight of the parties was a nationwide conference call hosted by Howard Dean, former vice president Al Gore, and Gore’s wife, Tipper, in which 1,675 callers–most presumably on speakerphones–listened in.

For the Dean campaign, the house parties were a way to close fourth quarter fundraising with a bang–by the end of the night, Dean had raised some $500,000, putting his total for the quarter at about $15 million. The parties were also a way to signify the great strides made by the campaign over the past 12 months: On January1, 2003, Dean had about $157,000 in cash on hand, after raising a total of $314,052. A year later, he has raised over $40 million, amassed a list of 552,930 supporters, and made Democratic fundraising history.

But for Paul, the house party was more than a fundraising tool. His mother had died recently, he explained, and she had thrown some great parties in her time. “I wanted to keep the party going,” he said. And so he and Pamela Alesky, his political-scientist “sweetheart” who is between jobs, invited about a dozen of their friends over for homemade deep-dish pizza, spicy buffalo wings, and beer. “There will even be a conservative there,” Paul said, when I first asked if I could join his party.

Maybe he was talking about Wendy, a legal secretary, who came to the party accompanied by her husband, a friend of Paul’s. Wendy told me that, while Dean was “interesting,” she agreed with Joe Lieberman on most issues. But she knew in her heart that Lieberman’s campaign was collapsing. And so she had turned Machiavellian: “Dean has a chance” to defeat Bush, she said. “Lieberman’s the better candidate, but the end justifies the means.”

This is the sort of thinking you find a lot of among loyal Democrats these days. A recent Pew Research Center poll, for example, showed that Dean has a sizable lead in New Hampshire and Iowa among Democrats “who place a greater priority on defeating Bush.” If Bush is to be defeated, the logic goes, then Democrats need to rally around Dean. And defeating Bush was the priority of everyone I met at the Wing Ding Pizza Thing.

Alanna Duckett, for example. Duckett, who runs a medical-transcription service from her home, first spotted Howard Dean last year, when, she said, he was still “Howard Who?” She took to him quickly: “I said, well, Harry Truman’s back. The man says what he believes. He’s the only one who had the guts to oppose war with Iraq from the start.”

Alanna has contributed about $500 to the Dean campaign so far, all in small-dollar amounts. “I try to give each month,” she said, because the stakes are quite high. When she looks at Bush, she told me, she thinks, “I’m sure this is how Hitler got his start.” And we can’t be like the Germans in the 1930s, and just “do nothing,” she said. Bush “is dangerous.”

And intimidating. As I sipped my cup of coffee, I fell into conversation with a well-dressed lady who said she’s “actively retired” and a “Democrat who is willing to vote for Republicans.” But the Bush name, she told me, and all the connections and influence that follow from its long history, “is so strong and powerful that to me it’s very scary.”

“I think the press is fearful of this administration,” she added. “I’ve seen a shift in the Washington Post. . . . They’re less willing to criticize the administration.”

Several partygoers nodded their heads.

“I still find hope in the New York Times,” Alanna said. “I get it on a daily basis, so I can read something that doesn’t raise my blood pressure.”

More nods.

My new “actively retired” friend hadn’t decided which Democrat she would pick in the February 10 Virginia primary. She had decided, however, that the debates featuring all nine Democratic presidential candidates weren’t helping. “It’s very tedious,” she said. The Democrats’ problem is that they lack the “meanness” and “bitterness” of conservatives. But that’s starting to change: “There has never been this much negative feeling toward a president” as there has been with Bush, she said.

I mentioned that Bush’s approval ratings have returned to about 60 percent.

“I wonder who’s taking these polls,” sniffed Alanna.

Paul interrupted: The conference call with Governor Dean was set to begin in a few minutes, he said, and he wanted to play the Howard Dean biographical DVD that he had received as part of his house party kit. The dozen or so of us gathered around the television, and for the duration of the DVD, we became an odd sort of extended family.

The Dean biopic had its moments. First, it featured excerpts of his stump speech, which you often hear about but rarely hear. It’s a powerful–chilling, even–performance. As airy dance music plays in the background, Dean runs through the thanks-be-to-the-Internet boilerplate (“We are built from the mouse pads up . . .” he begins), but then he launches into his call-and-response chant with the audience, in which the refrain is “You have the power!”

“You have the power to take this country back from the corporations and special interests!” barks Dean. “You have the power to have a foreign policy consistent with American principles!” and so on. Dean jabs his fists. His voice grows hoarse. The audience goes wild. It’s probably the reason why, you begin to understand, Dean has connected so viscerally with so many people.

There were only snippets of the stump speech, however, and one got the impression that the campaign doesn’t want too much coverage of the “You have the power” chant, at least until Dean delivers it on the last night of the Democratic convention. Pretty soon, the speech ends, and we are plunged into a milquetoast political biography, with gushing testimonials from the candidate’s wife, mother, brothers, friends, and college roommates.

Even this portion of the DVD had its moments. There was, for example, the spot where Howard, always reluctant to bring up his privileged birth, said that he and his brothers spent a lot of time outdoors as kids because “we grew up in a place, eastern Long Island, that didn’t have any television.” (Don’t fret, though: The Dean country house in Easthampton did have running water.)

But such comedic gems passed by without comment from my fellow house partiers. They liked the DVD; afterwards someone mentioned, to no one in particular, that Dean’s family “looks very nice.” Another person exclaimed, “I never knew about his record in Vermont!” A third said, “He doesn’t speak down to you.”

When the national conference call began, Paul sat in the corner and started to count the fundraising checks. On the speakerphone, a campaign staffer introduced Tipper, who introduced Al, who introduced Howard. The Gores phoned in from Tennessee; Dean from some unspecified location on the road.

Tipper said how happy she and Al were to join Howard Dean’s campaign. Then she turned philosophical, setting the tone for the rest of the call. How great a thing it is, she said, to be “part of something that is larger than yourself.” Al said that those listening in on the call were part of a “movement,” one that’s “already reinvigorating democracy itself and the Democratic party.” Dean said that the campaign “is not about me or [campaign honcho] Joe Trippi or people in Burlington. It’s all about us taking back our country.”

At the end of the talk, after Dean had answered a few questions from the house parties that had raised the most money, the operators opened all 1,675 phone lines, and tens of thousands of partygoers across the country screamed in unison, “Happy Dean Year!” People laughed with joy.

A friend of Paul’s shut off the speakerphone, and for a moment everyone sat in silence. A graduate-school friend of Pamela Alesky’s, who until now had simply muttered political science-ese under her breath (“rentier,” “herd mentality”), broke the silence with a question: “Do those of you here think that Dean can accomplish this?”

Only Alanna, who had supported Dean from the beginning, said yes.

“People are starting to recognize his name–and that’s what’s important,” a heavyset man suggested.

“It’s going to be tough,” said Pam. “There’s nothing really substantive coming out from any of the candidates at this point.”

People pursed their lips thoughtfully.

The party broke up soon thereafter. Paul told me that the event had raised $723.30 from 18 people–not a princely sum, to be sure, but nothing to laugh at either. He asked if I wanted to take home any pizza. “It’s got the whole-wheat crust,” he said, “and mushrooms and artichokes. Or you can take the one with pepperoni and sausage–we call it the ‘Dead Flesh’ pizza.”

“Not tonight,” I said. Moving toward the door, I ran into Anne, the retiree whom Paul had met randomly at the Giant. She asked if I had seen her skydiving pictures. She had been skydiving four times, she said. She had started in 2000, a few months after her husband had passed away. “I wanted something to take my mind off of him,” she told me. “The next time I jump is going to be in April. And I’m going to wear a Howard Dean T-shirt.”

She turned to Paul, whom she hardly knew, smiled, and said, “I’m so glad you saw the bumper sticker.”

Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.