The Dean Connection - NYT Mag (Must Read!)

Ben Stechschulte for The New York Times
Jilted Techies for Dean, Vermont chapter: Zack Rosen and Clay Johnson refocus their devotion.




By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO

Published: December 7, 2003


-snip-


Others take steps of their own invention: they cover their pajamas with stickers that say ''Howard Dean Has a Posse'' and wear them to an art opening, or they organize a squadron to do ''Yoga for Dean.'' They compose original songs in honor of Dean. (About two dozen people have done that; another man wrote a set of 23 limericks.) They marry each other wearing Dean paraphernalia. Overweight supporters create Web pages documenting, in daily dispatches, their efforts to lose 100 pounds in time for Dean's election. One woman, Kelly Jacobs of Hernando, Miss., took it upon herself to travel around the Memphis area for 15 weeks, standing on a single street corner for a week at a time, to promote Dean. I saw a middle-aged man at a garden party in New Hampshire preface a question to Dean by saying he was associated with Howards for Howard. Dean nodded, as if the man had said he was with the AARP.

- snip-
People at all levels of the Dean campaign will tell you that its purpose is not just to elect Howard Dean president. Just as significant, they say, the point is to give people something to believe in, and to connect those people to one another. The point is to get them out of their houses and bring them together at barbecues, rallies and voting booths.

- snip -
Dean supporters do not drive 200 miles through 10 inches of snow -- as John Crabtree, 39, and Craig Fleming, 41, did to attend the November Dean meet-up in Fargo, N.D. -- to see a political candidate or a representative of his staff. They drive that far to see each other.

I attended one meeting of a handful of Dean supporters in the basement of the public library in Hooksett, N.H. It felt as much like a support group as a political rally. As they did at Clay Johnson's meet-up in Atlanta, everyone went around the circle describing what drew them to Dean, usually in very personal language.

-snip-

The official representative of the Dean campaign that night in Hooksett was Lauren Popper, a 24-year-old actress who temporarily left her boyfriend and career in New York City to work as an organizer for the Dean campaign in Manchester, N.H. She was motivated to volunteer for a weekend in part because she admired Dean's policy of having every new mother in Vermont visited by a state social worker, but she stayed for other reasons. Popper broke into tears several times while trying to explain what they were.

''The thought that he'll be president is a side effect,'' she said. ''This campaign is about allowing people to come together and tell their life stories.''


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Much, much, more (seven pages) at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/magazine/07DEAN.html

Please read, and ask if this is what we want to put up against * in a nationwide election? Is this what we want for our country? Is this what this nation and its good people need at this critical time in history?

A CULT??

Edited to shorten the piece to DU standards. I wanted to present a full a picture as possible of what I found to be an very alarming article.

... And no I am not being f'ing serious.

I am not a member of a cult, thank you very much. I happen to think Dean is our best chance to rescue our country from some very evil people. Yes, that's exciting.

I don't know who your candidate is, but I sincerely hope that he or she would never stoop to this kind of smear against another Democrat.

why is it that old time DUers still do this?

...missed the boat if you believe the Dean supporters are basically part of a cult.

Would you consider the fans of a college football team to be a cult? They get together for much of the same reasons, and some even wear funny clothing. How about the old Grateful Dead "deadheads" that followed the Dead from concert to concert? How about people that go to church every Sunday?

Let me ask you another question? How much of a positive light would the New York Times want to cast on ANY Democratic candidate?

I was joking with another Gephardt supporter once that we should announce a major Dean meetup in some remote part of Vermont during the New Hampshire primary, telling New Hampshire Deanies they should plan to leave home early and stay late, thus causing the doctor an electoral defeat on that day. But I was only joking. The social aspect of Dean's movement is a strong factor and certainly worthy of some mild derision but politics is fundamentally a social activity and similarly styled movements, such as the Christian Coalition, have been successful in the past. I just hope that if Dean loses the nomination that he and his followers still support the party's nominee, whoever that may be.

People have become increasingly disconnected from other individuals and the traditional instituions in our society. While I have not read the book "Bowling Alone", I have read about it and tend to agree with the glosses I have seen: we no longer connect in the ways we did a generation or more ago to others in our community.

We have all seen, and probably to some extent experienced, alienation from our country's civic life. Some people are at the world they live in, and identify perhaps with Dr. Dean's anger. Whatever their reasons, I think the willingness of a lot of individuals to reconnect with out civic life through the Dean campaign is an incredibly positive thing.

I expect to see a lot more of this sort of amateur psycho-babble and other weak attempts by our civic elites to try and understand something outside their ken. Worse, I expect to see planted stories and story ideas to try and build on this idea that the Dean movement is some sort of wacko cult. Some will not double originate from inside our own party, either from other candidates or the DNC or DLC.

I don't expect to see a lot of stories about how fundamentalist, end-times Christianity plays a role in the Republican Party. This world view is more closely alligned with what many of us would consider a "cult", and they have much greater access to the levers of power.

Committing to a campaign in a significant way is a very "cultish" thing to do. It can completely take over your life, and lead to doing nothing else all your waking hours for months at a time. I've done this both as a volunteer and for pay.

By the same token, enlisting in the miliary involves completely surrending your life to the military in service of their mission, to the exclusion of all else. People have enlisted in the service for all sorts of reasons through the years, including perhaps being jilted by their girlfriend and not knowing what to do next.

Should we treat everyone in a uniform as a member of a dangerous cult?

This is a ridiculous attempt of the media elite (and the political elite) to try and explain an uprising against them in terms they find comforting. I am sure that Czar and his family had no end of ways to explain the unrest in the capital, not all of them from Rasputin.

But rationalizing the Dean movement is not coming to terms with it and dealing with it. As long as the elites in the media and our wing of the body politic continue to delude themselves in this way, they are setting the party up for defeat in the next election. It will not be Dean's fault, it will be their own.

Either the DNC and much of our elected leadership will try to block Dean at the convention, alienating the Dean movement, or else they will talk them selves into "Dukakisizing" the 2004 election, and sit on their hands.

Either way, it will not be the fault of the Dean movement if our leaders sabotage our own chances of defeating Bush by trying to sabotage Dean. And those whom the Dean movement has motivated, if they have staying power beyond November, 2004, will not be terribly pleased with our current Congressional and national committee crop.

guess I was a member of A CULT back then too.

If there's A CULT we should be worried about, look no further than the demonic, secretive bunch already in office. Cooking up their next war, nook-u-lar arsenal, Patriot Act I & II, etc, etc.

get a grip

Probably not...

I cannot find anything is Dean's past performance as VT governor to justify such trust in him as a populist. Can someone PLEASE direct me to some evidence that Dean is not just another centrist. Hell, he even says on his website that he is a CENTRIST! Why on earth would people be so interested in supporting another in a long line of centrists????? Please explain this to me? Is it his confident good looks? His manly and powerful voice?

Are we still just animals that cleave to and obey alpha males who have all the right physical markers? PLease tell me this is not the case.....

How can anyone read this article and not be moved by it? Like him or not
the Dean campaign has a magic to it that is almost unprecedented. Its beginning to look like the beginning of a movement that will survive if Dean is the nominee or not.

The Democratic party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up and I hope this is the beginning.

Thanks for posting

In answer to your question (A CULT??): No :hi:

and it's a doomed campagaign if it ever reaches past the primary stage.

Other than the people tying to lose weight, none of the other actions undertaken show any constructive or realistic nature to the supporters.

They basically show an attraction to a Dean chic, and quite commonly that they have bizzare ways of eencorporating it into there lives

:eyes:

not validate ourselves by joining a group that accepts us, that speaks to us. Geez Louise. But we are starting to understand the phenomenon. It's not about the US. It's not about us. It's about them.

This is inflammatory. Please feel free to repost without using the word "cult."


Thank you.

DU Moderator