…in the guise of a Presidential campaign, rolled into Seattle Sunday evening. The big event was scheduled to start at 5:30, but crowds weren’t even herded into a fenced-off Westlake Park until nearly 6. The usual political-rally opening acts (earnest singers, local political who-dats, campaign grunt operatives, and the like) sufficiently bored the teeming audience into chanting for the man himself to mount the stage. Which he finally did around 7:20.
(No local elected officials appeared onstage; neatly reinforcing Dean’s valuable public image as an insurgent loved more by the commonfolk than by Demo party bigshots.)
What he said: The expected, sure-fire, audience-pleasin’ attacks on Bush’s “election,” Bush’s corporate-crook and hate-radio friends, Bush’s deficits, Bush’s race-baiting, Bush’s homophobia, Bush’s foreign-relations disasters, and, natch, Bush’s not-as-simple-as-it-first-seemed war.
(Westlake was where most of the big antiwar marches were held around here in the past year. Dean’s after-the-fact judgment was, sadly, damn close to some of the pre-March-17 protest speakers’ worst predictions.)
Some of his sharpest barbs, naturally given that it’s the still-early days of pre-primary (and, in our state, pre-caucus) season, came against his fellow Democratic challengers; particularly the Democratic Leadership Council campers such as Joe Lieberman who, Dean alleged, are trying too hard to emulate Bush and not hard enough to oppose Bush.
Even whilst running against the DLC, Dean’s candidacy echoes many of ol’ DLC darling Bill Clinton’s early schticks. Like the 1991-model Clinton, Dean proclaims himself to be a man of the people from a heartland state-house, not a team-player from the D.C. establishment. He vows to clean out the corruption and the influence-peddling, and to bring the nation back to its onetime populist ideals.
At this point it’s working. The previously obscure ex-governor of an obscure state has pushed himself into a statistical tie for poll numbers and campaign donations. His ingenious Internet-based campaign gives him the aura of a rugged individualist, not a prepackaged product.
(In music-biz terms, Dean’s billing himself as the political equivalent of a DIY indie-rock purist, and dissing the other big Demo candidates as slick, irrelevant, major-label pretty boys.)
Dean’s got just the kind of street-cred Clinton strove for, and which no other DLC-approved candidate has ever bothered with. And despite the DLC’s official line, I believe no Democrat can beat Bush without this kind of avid ground support.
Whether Dean will get the nomination, whether he’ll get elected, and whether he’ll keep any of his many promises all remain to be seen, of course.
