Scream II

Last year, a major Democratic donor from the 2004 presidential campaign received a call from some operatives at Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee (DNC). Dean was coming to town in a few days, they told him, and they wanted to schedule a meeting. Political fund-raisers normally make such calls a month in advance, and so the seat-of-the-pants approach didn't go over well. "You can't call me the week before and say, `Hey ... we'll be there Monday, want to hang out?'" says the donor. "They had all these fucking hippies. ... These are people that are great to raise a few$500 checks, plan a party at a nightclub. But they're not the folks you need to give you [the resources] to do the things you want to do." Up until recently, the DNC was the last place you'd expect to find such amateurism. Dean's immediate predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, learned his craft from legendary House Democratic moneyman Tony Coelho in the 1980s, then went on to become "the greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe," as Al Gore has claimed. McAuliffe once grappled with a 280-pound gator to seal a contribution from a Florida Indian tribe; he has passed many a "three-brunch, three-lunch day," as The Washington Post has put it, frolicking among donors. Not surprisingly, McAuliffe believed his job as DNC chairman consisted mainly of one responsibility: stockpiling money for the upcoming presidential election. And he was fabulously successful at it. In 2004 alone, McAuliffe raised roughly $350 million, helping the DNC out-raise its GOP counterpart for the first time ever. But, of course, we all knew Howard Dean wasn't going to spend his afternoons sipping Bloody Marys with the Diners Club set. In a sense, that was exactly the point. This was a man who, after all, based his insurgent presidential campaign on bashing the party's Washington mandarins. What's so remarkable about Dean's brief tenure at the DNC is not that he's stayed true to his populist roots. It's that he's actually turned the most insider institution in all of Democratic politics into a weapon in his battle against the party establishment. Symbolic of Dean's early efforts to remake the DNC was a man named Lindsay Lewis. Lewis had spent most of the 1990s as a fund-raiser for Dick Gephardt before eventually signing on as a midlevel Dean staffer in 2003. After Dean dropped out of the Democratic primaries, he hired Lewis to oversee fundraising for his grassroots organization, Democracy for America. "There weren't a lot of people dying to live in Burlington, Vermont, at that point in time," is how one former Dean campaign official explains the hiring. Dean sprung Lewis from Burlington to be the DNC's finance director in early 2005. Not long after, Lewis and his team kicked off their cultural revolution with a purge, sidelining key McAuliffe-era staffers. "They didn't include a lot of the old gang ... in any meetings, planning," says one former DNC official. "A lot of them got frustrated and left." (Lewis says most staffers had decided to leave before he arrived.) But it quickly became clear that Lewis's staff had little clue about how to court wealthy donors, which accounted for over $100 million of McAuliffe's 2004 haul. "One day, I ran into one of the people in finance--the high-dollar folks," says a McAuliffe holdover not directly involved in raising money. "I said, `How's it going?' They said, `We've got a lot of work to do to teach these people about grassroots fund- raising.' I said, `You're in [high-dollar work]. What are you talking about?' It was the disconnect of a young kid who didn't understand the business." Some major donors also became disenchanted. "I don't think [Lewis] had the right staff in place at the time to move the agenda forward," says Chris Korge, the granddaddy of Florida donors. A big part of the problem is Dean himself. Unlike McAuliffe, Dean had little entree into the world of big-time Democratic donors when he took over as chairman; most of the money he had raised for his presidential campaign had come from small, online contributions. Culturally, too, Dean remains the antithesis of a Washington eminence. He still resides in Vermont, and, unlike McAuliffe, who owns a home in McLean, Virginia, Dean stays at a hotel during the night or two a week he's in town. You could stake out powerbroker haunts like the Capital Grille or the Caucus Room for weeks before ever seeing him. Little surprise, then, that Dean's fund-raising take proved disappointing in 2005. True, the DNC's $56 million was $12 million more than the party had raised during the last nonelection year. But McAuliffe didn't build the party's massive donor list until 2004. The more useful measure is the relative drop-off among the two parties from 2004 to 2005. The RNC fell off by about $180 million; the DNC dropped nearly $300 million. Once every four to six weeks, Dean sits down somewhere on Capitol Hill with the two most powerful Democrats in Washington, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. One topic of conversation comes up regularly: the DNC's spending priorities. Reid and Pelosi believe the party may be poised to win back Congress after over a decade in the wilderness. They want Dean to pony up for the cause. Dean's response to their invitation is invariably the same, according to a senior Democratic congressional staffer who has attended the meetings. "He'll say, `I hear you. But that's the problem with Democrats. We have to think big.'" It's fitting that the idea animating Dean's tenure at the DNC is a big one. Dean, after all, effectively sacrificed his future presidential ambitions to pursue his current job. The only reason he would do such a thing is that he considers the DNC post more important than even the presidency. And, in some ways, it is. Dean's goal is nothing less than saving the party by laying the groundwork for a future Democratic majority. The way he has pursued it is by giving states money and power that Washington had been hogging for decades. Not long after taking over at the DNC, for example, Dean quickly committed millions to hiring operatives--organizers, strategists, spokesmen--in each of the 50 states that didn't already have these personnel. Dean's approach has a powerful logic to it. Consider a state like Texas. In 2004, the political birthplace of George W. Bush became a majority minority state. But, because the Texas Democratic Party was basically defunct--it didn't boast a single full-time staffer--Democrats had next to no ability to reach out to the local black and Latino population. Since 2005, however, the DNC has hired three permanent staffers in Texas, who have in turn recruited dozens of local volunteers. The state is unlikely to swing Democratic in 2008. But there's no reason it couldn't do so by 2020. Of course, no one objects to building up parties in, say, the eight or ten red states where it's likely to have the most effect. The skepticism relates to Dean's all-or-nothing approach. "You can't sacrifice '08 for the benefit of 20 years from now," says Korge, who is generally supportive of Dean. "The country just cannot afford it." Dean recently generated some good buzz by replacing Lewis with a fundraiser named Carl Chidlow. But even the well-respected Chidlow has had trouble overcoming these concerns. At heart, Dean's persistent messianism is simply at odds with the DNC chairman's traditional role as loyal servant to the eventual Democratic nominee. Several months ago, one top Democratic fund-raiser took him aside and explained that the DNC wouldn't raise much money unless Dean committed himself to making an endless stream of self-abasing phone calls. "He was not argumentative," says this person. "But I didn't feel, after that, that he was willing or capable of making those calls.... He was more interested in seeing who can do this for me." One way or another, Dean's moment of truth will come in March 2008, when a Democrat effectively locks up the presidential nomination. If the past is any indication, the nominee will insist on boring in on the 20 or so states most likely to clinch 270 electoral votes. But Dean, according to those who know him, will continue to insist on funding his 50-state strategy. "Any Democrat running for president needs to understand that ... Howard is not going to throw that over the side of the ship," says Steve Grossman, a Dean ally and former DNC chairman. And if they don't? "It's going to be a tough conversation."