Glass Maze Endorses Howard Dean

We went down to the Howard Dean rally in Virginia today. It’s the first stop in his Sleepless Summer Tour, an ambitious, four-day, eight-city barnstorm across the country. Dean is suddenly big-time: he has money now, and name recognition, and he’s apparently determined to make it count.

The rally was held at Cherry Hill park, a nice little splash of green in the middle of a gently aging neighborhood in Falls Church. As soon as we got into the park, we were herded into a sort of corral, fenced in with metal barriers and yellow caution tape. There was a bank of cameras on a high platform at the back of the area, and a stage in front, with a rustic, photogenic barn in the background. Large speakers and spotlights on either side of the stage, and a reggae band strumming and wailing between them. We found a tiny open space, and sat down. It was a perfect day, blue skies, fluffy white clouds, cool breeze.

After the band finished their set, someone threw a beachball into the corral, and it bounced along the surface of the crowd, careening off of balled fists and open palms and unsuspecting heads like one of those little sing-along dots that used to guide the audience through song lyrics in old movies — except this one looked like it was trying to keep up with a Pixes tune mixed in with something by Marilyn Manson. Soon it was joined by another, much larger beachball, a striped galumphing boulder of a ball; and then by a third. We played three-ball-bounce for twenty minutes while we waited. Somehow, it was really a lot of fun.

Then the warm-up speakers arrived at the podium: a democratic party youth organizer, the mayor of Falls Church, a former English teacher, the superintendent of Virginia schools, and, finally, the mayor of Alexandria. Most of the speeches were merely competent, hitting all the expected notes at the expected times, and my mind sort of wandered, and my gaze with it. A guy in front of me was wearing a red t-shirt with the McDonald’s M inverted to look like a W — specifically, the W in George W Bush. It said: “George W Bush: One million rich guys served.” Another t-shirt exhorted its readers to impeach Bush. Off to my left, a little girl tugged at the hem of this guy’s shirt until he hoisted her onto his shoulders; her sister noticed, and then found her own guy to climb. An extremely pierced teenager in black everything stood near the front of the crowd, holding up her Dean for President placard and bellowing with each applause line. A black man off to my right, wearing one of those long drooping beret-looking knit hats, stood with his hands behind his back, staring ahead through aviator shades, motionless. He remained motionless throughout, an odd stillness in the midst of what was rapidly becoming a restless, kinetic, tumultous, exciting afternoon.

And then Dean stepped up to the podium, and the crowd went wild, as crowds will do from time to time. It was exhilarating, it really was. I’d seem him in photographs and on TV hundreds of times, of course, but it’s another thing entirely to see the man in the flesh. I clapped and shouted with the rest. Dean basked in our adulation for a little while, then thanked us and started talking.

The first thing he did was lay out the structure of his speech, and — I imagine — of his campaign. He’d tell us everything that Bush was doing wrong, he said, then explain why it was wrong in concrete terms, then offer alternatives. This is textbook, the classic recipe for an insurgent campaign. But the speech never got bogged down in boilerplate, or felt forced, or canned, or hackneyed. It was fresh, and surprising, and frequently inspired. It didn’t go through the paces so much as it hacked through the underbrush: it was the speech of a man with the same goals as his competitors, but bent on getting there the right way, which is also — almost by definition, these days — the hard way.

He started with the economy, because — let’s face it — that’s pretty low-hanging fruit. There was the depressing litany of statistics: the highest deficit this country has ever seen, less money for the states, high unemployment, the 3.1 trillion dollar tax cut largely-targeted at the richest among us, a budget that is so far in the red that it’ll soon shift out of the visible spectrum. He pointed out that no Republican president has balanced a budget in 35 years. “You just can’t trust those guys with money,” he said. “It’s always borrow and spend with them, borrow and spend.” I thought that was nice little rhetorical sleight of hand, taking the perennial criticism traditionally leveled at the democrats and turning it on its head.

He did a lot of that, actually. When he talked about defense, he pointed out that Bush had taken away a large chunk of veteran health care benefits, failed to adequately fund the port authority’s inspection of inbound containers, failed to provide money for homeland security to the states, and, in particular, New York. He went through all of the lies that Bush and his merry band told us to justify our entry into Iraq: the uranium, the ties to Al-Quaida, the nearly operational nuclear program, etc. And then he said this: “I supported the first war in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein invaded one of our allies, and it was our moral duty to do something about it. I supported the war in Afghanistan, because we had to go after Al-Quaida and the government that was sheltering them: they killed 3000 people on our soil, and would have killed many more, given the chance. If I’m elected president, I will not hesitate to use American forces to protect our national security. But I promise you this: I will never send our men and women to die on foreign soil without telling the American people the truth about why I’m doing it.”

Well, that was just breathtaking. Not only did it take Bush to task for systematically lying to us, it neatly countered what promises to be a strong line of Republican attack: Dean’s opposition to the war. And this is Dean’s secret weapon, I think: he’s talking like a fire-breathing liberal, now, but he’s much more moderate than he seems, and he’s got the record to prove it. This take on the war in Iraq is just one example of that.

There were lots of genuinely great moments in the speech. Whether he was scolding Bush for refusing to negotiate with Kim Jong-Il because he doesn’t like the man (”we shouldn’t have a foreign policy based on petulance”), or lamenting the fact that, nearly alone in the first world, we do not have a national health care system (”I’m tired of being a second class citizen in the industrialized world”), or pointing out that the Bush team’s reputation as defensive stalwarts just doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny (”as they say in Texas, the man’s all hat and no cattle”), he was always articulate, pithy, forceful and forthright, and just completely in command of the situation. It was a bravura performance.

I was very sorry when it was over. I trailed the clot of admirers that followed him to his car, buzzing around his little entourage like gnats, then watched him drive off into the sunset. It was a perfect departure (right down to the people’s car he drove off in, a black Honda Civic), but I couldn’t quite enjoy it as much as I should have. Because there was still the nagging question, the one that followed me to the rally, whispering itself into my ear all through his speech, whispering even now: does he really have a chance?

I’m not sure. There are a lot of people against him, both outside the party and in. But he has this going for him: he’s no pie-in-sky left-wing ideologue. There’s a rough-hewn practicality to his agenda, a realistic assessment of what’s possible that tempers its idealism, in some ways, but enhances it in others — by making its goals realistic, and therefore achievable.

In one sense, this campaign may still be entirely quixotic, and end up shattering itself against the walls of Money and Power and Influence, in the same way that the McCain insurgency did three years ago. But, in another sense, it’s already succeeded: Dean has injected real feeling and hope and purpose into the sad, soiled process of electing a president, and has managed to get a bunch of disaffected people interested in the direction that their country is taking, a magnificent achievement in and of itself. He may not be our country’s salvation, but, at the very least, he’s a salve for its wounds. And he’s got my vote.