By ANDREW GUMBEL
LOS ANGELES - A few months ago, Kimmy Cash was just another disaffected 28-year-old California punk with a pierced nose looking for a cause to believe in.
Then she stumbled on Howard Dean, the man who would be George W. Bush's Democratic challenger in next November's presidential election, and her life changed in dramatic and unexpected ways.
She became not just a convert, converts being part and parcel of any half-decent campaign for high political office. She became not just a volunteer, because the word suggests someone who licks envelopes or makes phone calls at the candidate's behest. Rather, she has turned into the queen of her own pet enterprise, which is to politicise America's two million punks and get them interested in electoral politics.
Another presidential campaign might have insisted that she subject her ideas to committee approval. Another might have been nervous about having a punk fan club at all. But the Dean people, with their radical new approach to grassroots organising, told her to go right ahead, no questions asked, and the results are extraordinary.
Her website, punx for Dean, receives thousands of hits each day. In less than three months she has signed up 13,000 volunteers to hand out literature at punk clubs and concert venues across all 50 states.
She is organising a nationwide series of concerts, the first rule of which is that every attendee must be registered to vote. (Registration forms will be on hand at the door.)
Next month, her site is putting out a CD of underground punk bands named after the Dean slogan "Taking Back America". By now, interest has grown so high from other youth groups that Cash is thinking of starting websites catering to hip-hoppers for Dean and skaters for Dean.
"Nobody's ever tapped into this demographic, and it kicks ass," she says on the phone from Arizona, where she is setting up new chapters of her organisation. The way she sees it, she's helping to effect a seismic shift in the way American politics operates by energising the half of the electorate that never usually votes.
Given that the margin between Al Gore and George Bush in several states in 2000 came down to a few hundred votes - in Oregon, New Mexico, New Hampshire as well as Florida - the punk factor could turn out to be no trivial matter.
Cash's personal devotion to the cause is impressive. She doesn't have a whole lot of money - she makes a living buying and selling vintage merchandise on eBay, the online auction site - but with her boyfriend and two children in tow she has thrown herself into the campaign as though she were running for office herself. She even has tattoos on both forearms reading "Dean - Truth - Hope" which she had done on the candidate's birthday (November 17) and which, she says, will serve as mementos of "a really cool period in my life" even if her man does not make it to the White House.
She is far from the only true believer in what - bizarrely, since this is the secular left-hand side of the American political spectrum, not the fundamentalist Christian right - has become a near-messianic cause.
Across the country, volunteers of all ages and interest groups have taken up the banner for the former Vermont Governor, devising their own strategies and forming their own sub-groups, pulling in friends, exasperating family members and gleefully neglecting their day-jobs.
More than 500,000 volunteers have signed up online, most of them with no experience of politics. By now there are websites devoted not only to punks for Dean, but also veterans for Dean, Asian Americans for Dean, cyclists and environmentalists for Dean, dykes for Dean, Deadheads and Mormons for Dean, even Republicans for Dean.
What binds them is a campaign unlike any other, likely to be studied and emulated far and wide.
The internet, on its own, could never have achieved the transformation that turned Dean from fringe candidate to seemingly unstoppable front-runner, from obscure Governor of a politically insignificant northeastern state to standard-bearer of a movement that promises to shake the Democratic Party out of its moribund torpor and set US politics alight.
The Dean phenomenon has relied, rather, on a felicitous combination of the man, his message, and an audacious use of digital media that has let the campaign lead him as much as he has led the campaign.
Usually, people aspiring to become president decide first that they are going to run, and settle only afterwards on a campaign platform. In other words, it is a top-down operation, staffed by political operatives and funded by special-interest lobbyists hoping to incorporate their own agenda into the candidate's.
Dean has turned that logic on its head. He started out identifying his constituency and then staked his claim to high public office by articulating its concerns and aspirations in ways not reflected in Washington or in the mainstream news media.
He assembled all the broken shards of discontent that people were feeling about a seemingly popular President and fashioned them back into a coherent whole. Because he believed in what he was saying and was not acting as a front for other interests, the sincerity of his delivery leapt out at people.
What he picked up on was people's helpless sense of anger: about the overweening power of corporations; about job losses and overseas factory relocations; about the loosening of environmental regulations; about the looting of company pension funds; about tax cuts that seemed to benefit only the rich; about the White House's failure to bail out cash-strapped states and prevent cuts in hospitals and other basic services; about the hit-and-miss approach to public safety after September 11; about the way the Bush Administration has wrapped itself in the mantle of patriotism and exploited the fear of ordinary Americans to justify an assault on civil liberties; and, perhaps most importantly, at the lies and phoney intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq.
Dean plugged into much the same constituency claimed by Ralph Nader when he ran for president on the Green Party ticket four years ago and made just enough of an impact to deny Al Gore the keys to the White House. Unlike Nader, though, Dean has run as a mainstream candidate and addressed a mass audience.
Dean has portrayed himself as a centrist, which he is, albeit an angry centrist determined to reform a system and a Democratic Party he says has lost its way.
His premise from the beginning was to be open to everyone and to give his followers the leeway to do as much legwork as he did. As his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, explained in a recent interview, it is much the same principle as the "pebble theory" that Gary Hart adopted in 1984 when he came close to snatching the Democratic Party nomination from Walter Mondale. You run into a town in Iowa and convince just one person: "That's your pebble. Drop your pebble in the water. And leave. Let that energy ripple out to other folks in town."
While the other candidates crunched numbers to try to identify their "core demographic" or organised ritzy fundraising dinners out of sight, and beyond the price-range, of ordinary voters, Dean barnstormed the country visiting coffee bars, transvestite clubs, private homes, schools, town hall meetings - anywhere that would have him. He turned nobody away and was receptive to everything. Kimmy Cash ran into him at a volunteer-organised fundraiser at Los Angeles' Union Station at the end of September, sneaking into a US$500-a-ticket area even though she had paid only US$100. Rather than sneering at her appearance or having her thrown out, Dean complimented her tattoos and stood patiently while she took a picture of him. Cash was so impressed that she ran home that night and bought the domain name for her website. "He told me I was a great supporter," she says. "He was so cool, so receptive."
He prompted similar reactions across the board. Susanne Savage, a former music industry executive from Los Angeles who decided very early on that she wanted to help kick George W. Bush out of the White House, wrote letters to the campaign staff of three Democratic candidates - Dean, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and North Carolina Senator John Edwards - to ask what she could do. Kerry invited her to pay US$2000 to attend a Hollywood fundraiser, which she did not fancy and could not afford. Edwards never got back to her at all. The Dean camp, by contrast, gave her a list of upcoming informal house parties in her area where attendees could contribute whatever they wanted and talk to the candidate on a speaker-phone conference call. "Right then, it was obvious to me he was different from the rest of the pack," she says.
Savage was soon co-ordinating a loose coalition of supporters called "LA for Dean" out of her living-room.
After a few months, a co-ordinator flew out from campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, to help them with their efforts. The group asked the co-ordinator, Aaron Holmes, what the campaign thought of this or that strategy, or how the campaign intended to broach such-and-such an organising issue. "You don't understand," Holmes said, "you are the campaign."
Mike Meurer, another LA volunteer, was open-mouthed with amazement. "I've been active on political campaigns for years," he says, "and this was the most stunning statement I've ever heard uttered by any of them."
Soon the LA group found it wielded real influence. During one conference call, Joe Trippi expressed frustration at his inability to find a snappy slogan to communicate a thought he had had about fundraising. To compete with Bush's anticipated US$200 million campaign war chest, he said, would require two million Dean supporters to contribute US$100 each. How to communicate this concept? Meurer, who runs his own marketing company, suggested calling it "the $100 revolution". His slogan was adopted.
In some respects, the Dean campaign is catching on to something the Republicans have already understood: that to win national elections, it is a mistake to focus your energies on courting the swing voters in the middle, who do not pay much attention and cannot be trusted to base their ultimate decision on anything more substantial than a candidate's smile or haircut. Rather, the important thing is to energise your base, give them something to be passionate about and get them to go out and mobilise the undecideds.
The big unanswered question, of course, is whether the Dean campaign has the momentum to win next November. In calmer times one might have rated his chances more confidently.
After all, he can draw on the same party base as Gore, who excited nobody but still won the popular vote in 2000, and at the same time he is recruiting hundreds of thousands of new voters. But these are not calm times, and it is far from clear whether Dean can counter the bellicose, us-versus-them rhetoric emanating from both the Bush Administration and the more conservative, corporate-financed wing of the Democratic Party.
- INDEPENDENT
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