The New Republic

With John Kerry cruising to victory, these are supposed to be
healing days for Democrats, when they embrace old adversaries and
apologize for vicious attacks launched during the primaries. But
now that Howard Dean has fallen, some in Washington can't resist
kicking the corpse one last time. Last week, I called Ivo Daalder,
an alumnus of Bill Clinton's national security team, at his
Brookings Institution office. And, while etiquette might dictate
that Daalder lavish praise on the vanquished candidate, he spent
our phone conversation critiquing Dean's foreign policy. In
Daalder's view, the Vermont governor's positions on Iraq range from
the facile--"bringing into [Iraq] one hundred thousand Muslim
troops that don't exist"--to the self-destructive--"I didn't like
that he criticized the [Democrats] senators who voted for the
eighty-seven billion dollars. We can't get things right in Iraq
without the funding."What makes this rebuke of Dean's foreign policy particularly odd is
that Daalder was himself a primary architect of that policy. It was
Daalder who helped draft the speech Dean delivered at the Pacific
Council for International Policy last December, outlining his
approach to national security. In foreign policy interviews Dean
gave to The Washington Post and The New York Times a day before
that speech, Daalder sat by the governor's side. Similarly, it was
Daalder who presided over a question-and-answer session at the
National Press Club, when the Dean campaign unveiled its foreign
policy team. According to one of his Brookings colleagues, who
watched a procession of high-powered Democrats traipse to Daalder's
office to pay respect to Dean, "Ivo was The Guy."

In the wake of Dean's unraveling, however, Daalder is promoting a
revisionist history of the campaign, where his status is downgraded
to something significantly less than The Guy. "My position is that
I'm happy to advise anyone." He pauses before adding, "I don't have
a central role, and I never did."

Why is Daalder backpedaling so furiously? Because he understands
that he could suffer payback for his Deaniac days. Dean, after all,
famously took aim at Washington politicians, at one point referring
to them as "cockroaches." And the feeling was largely mutual. Many
in the Democratic Party establishment felt the Dean campaign
represented the unmaking of Clinton's political legacy--a return to
the days when the party failed to package its policies for
mainstream consumption. Despite this, when Dean established himself
as the front-runner, some Washington Democrats followed Al Gore's
lead and jumped on people-powered Dean's bandwagon anyway.
Thirty-five congressional Democrats endorsed him before Iowa--more
than endorsed any other candidate--caucusing regularly at
California Representative Zoe Lofgren's house. Similarly, several
dozen pro- Dean lobbyists congregated weekly in the conference room
of power law firm Hogan %amp% Hartson. "You had a lot of people on
K Street joining right before Iowa," says lobbyist Toby Moffett, a
regular participant in the meetings. "They wanted to attach
themselves to a winner."

But Dean turned out not to be a winner. And now, those Democrats who
resisted Dean's anti-establishment revolution are enjoying
full-fledged schadenfreude at the expense of their pro-Dean
colleagues. "Is [Tom] Harkin still dancing around?" asks one Senate
aide, referring to his lively stump speeches on Dean's behalf. The
anti-Deaniacs particularly enjoy the irony that Carol Moseley Braun
endorsed Dean--and received a $20,000-per-month travel stipend from
his campaign--just as it was forced to put its workers on a pay
holiday. "Let's hope she asked for the money upfront," jokes one.

Officially, the Kerry campaign pledges to bring the party together
and to move past such gloating. But some establishment Democrats,
both inside and outside the Kerry campaign, still intend to punish
the Dean heretics. And, while well-known politicians, such as Gore,
Harkin, and Moseley Braun, may endure the most public abuse, the
people who may ultimately suffer explicit retribution for their
Dean-boosting are cogs in the Democratic machine--people like
Daalder, who toil in think tanks or union leadership or groups like
the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). As one former high-ranking
Clinton administration official puts it, "Will they work again in
this town again? I hope not."

Start with the foreign policy wonks. In most campaigns, the wonk is
a lonely, unwanted figure who places calls to campaign headquarters
in the hope that he'll be allowed to add a paragraph to a position
paper that will only be read by fellow wonks. For the Dean
campaign, by contrast, collecting Washington wonks was a matter of
necessity, a way to add gravitas to a campaign identified with
bloggers and aging hippies. This was particularly true on foreign
policy, where Dean had no public experience. As a result, the Dean
campaign's pursuit of foreign policy experts was remarkably
aggressive. According to one Democratic insider, Dean sent
emissaries to the house of former State Department spokesman Jamie
Rubin on three separate occasions, in addition to courting Rubin
personally. It wasn't just the marquee names that got this
treatment. Dean also assiduously wooed less well-known Clintonites.
"It was just weird how much effort they put into this," says an
aide to another candidate.

By the time Dean began assembling his national security team,
though, most of the Democratic foreign policy establishment--which
is now heavily clustered at the Brookings Institution--was already
quietly committed to the Kerry, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards
campaigns (in the case of some wonks, all three at once). Without
the party's A-list names, the Dean campaign began searching for
advisers in less glamorous quarters. For their foreign policy
rollout, they signed up former Secretary of State Warren
Christopher and former national security adviser Tony
Lake--veterans of Clinton's first term. But, in Democratic circles,
Clinton's first term is widely considered a low point in the
party's foreign policy, and, in any case, Christopher and Lake
weren't substantive advisers. So, last fall, Dean recruited two
mid-level Clintonites from Brookings for his day-to-day needs,
former Director of European Affairs at the National Security
Council Ivo Daalder and former Assistant Secretary of State for
African Affairs Susan Rice.

For many in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Dean was
seen as dangerous. They worried that his strident opposition to the
Iraq war would revive old clichs about the party's pacifism and
that his claim that Saddam Hussein's capture did nothing to enhance
U.S. security would prove fodder for countless GOP ads. No one was
more concerned on this score than Daalder's Brookings colleague and
occasional co-author, Michael O'Hanlon, who penned scathing op-eds
in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times attacking Dean.
O'Hanlon, who advises several of the candidates--including
Kerry--told me, "More Democrats should have recognized [Dean's]
danger and spoken out against him." Within Brookings, O'Hanlon's
pieces were seen as a direct assault on Daalder and Rice and a
break with the institution's genteel mores. One Brookings fellow
describes them as "just bizarre. Forgive me, but that was personal,
not professional." Others at the think tank reported witnessing
loud, uncomfortable hallway arguments between Daalder and O'Hanlon
over Dean.

At the time, Dean was still riding high, and--O'Hanlon's attacks
notwithstanding--so were Daalder and Rice. But now that Dean is
done, Rice and especially Daalder may find their career prospects
also dimmed. When I spoke with the foreign policy gurus who would
likely stock a Democratic administration, they seemed to regard the
Dean campaign as a debilitating black mark on one's resum. It
doesn't help Daalder that he took an aggressive posture during
Dean's glory days. Instead of privately conceding his candidate's
foreign policy shortcomings, Daalder defended him to the hilt.
"After Dean delivered the line about Saddam's capture, Ivo was
quite animated in defending that sentence," says one Brookings
fellow. And, as a former Clinton administration official told me,
"If you're a policy adviser, you exist to stop lines like that from
being delivered. And, if it gets delivered over your objections,
you have an obligation to fall on your sword. This whole campaign
causes me to question [Daalder's and Rice's] judgment."

As Kerry's consolidation of power continues, rancorous debates over
the Dean campaign will probably disappear from the hallways of
Brookings. But that doesn't mean that those disputes will be
forgotten. One fellow at the Brookings Institution accuses Dean's
foreign policy advisers of "contributing to a [campaign] that could
have helped their careers but hurt the party." It doesn't look like
Brookings will be regaining its gentility any time soon.

Another case of Howard Dean buyer's remorse was visible on the front
pages this week, when Gerald McEntee, the head of the American
Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (afscme),
yanked his union's endorsement of the former front-runner. The
newspapers described afscme's withdrawal of support as a sign of
the Dean campaign's impending doom. And it is certainly that. But
it may also be a sign of McEntee's impending doom.

Over the last 15 years, McEntee acquired an almost mythic reputation
within the labor movement for shrewd political judgment. When most
of labor rallied behind Harkin's 1992 bid for the presidency,
McEntee bucked his comrades and embraced long-shot Bill Clinton.
During the 1995 campaign for afl-cio president, McEntee did more
than anyone in the movement to install the underdog John Sweeney.
And, in return for these gambles, in 1996 he was rewarded with the
mother of all afl-cio appointments: head of the federation's
political education committee, a position that placed him in charge
of labor's multimillion-dollar voter-turnout operation.

At the beginning of last year, McEntee set out to play kingmaker
once again. While the industrial unions were trying to rally the
afl-cio around longtime ally Richard Gephardt, McEntee was fawning
over Kerry. In February, McEntee told the Associated Press--and any
other publication that would listen--that "Kerry would have the
best chance" of overcoming George W. Bush's wartime glow. But, when
the Kerry campaign lost its early luster last spring, McEntee began
searching for a new horse. The next object of his affection was
Clark. When McEntee invited Clark to his union's L Street
headquarters for a meeting last July, the general hadn't yet
decided to fling his hat into the race. But McEntee likes to flaunt
his machinations to the press. According to labor officials,
without warning Clark, he invited a scrum of reporters to surprise
the general with microphones and cameras as he exited their
tte--tte.

McEntee's flirtation with Clark, however, was as short-lived as it
was public. The abortive nature of their romance apparently had
less to do with the merits of the general's candidacy than with the
internal politics of the labor movement. McEntee's chief rival
within the afl-cio is Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees
Industrial Union (seiu), whose membership rolls have grown in
recent years thanks to its recruitment of government workers who
had traditionally joined afscme. Long before Dean emerged as a
viable candidate, Stern had praised the Vermont governor for his
emphasis on health care, seiu's defining issue. As the Dean
campaign caught fire last summer, Stern and his left-leaning rank
and file moved toward endorsing him. And this, in turn, spurred
McEntee to action. "The prospect of Stern taking the spotlight for
himself pissed the hell out of Jerry," says one Washington labor
official. So, McEntee countered Stern's impending endorsement by
quickly moving afscme behind Dean, too.

By backing Dean, McEntee and Stern were explicitly rejecting
Gephardt. For months, the industrial unions had been campaigning
for the afl-cio to endorse the former House minority leader. Their
attachment to Gephardt was deeply personal--union organizers in
Iowa wore i gave my blood for gephardt pins--but it was more than
that, too. "If you don't stand behind a guy who's been with you for
more than twenty years, how are you going to be able to convince
other politicians to take risks on your behalf?" asks one afl-cio
official. Thanks in large part to McEntee and Stern's dissents,
Gephardt's allies failed to win the two-thirds vote of afl-cio's
member unions necessary for an endorsement. It didn't help McEntee
and Stern's standing within the movement that the Dean and Gephardt
campaigns collided head-on in Iowa, in effect requiring afscme and
seiu to go to war against the industrial unions backing Gephardt.
Nor did it help that the ensuing nastiness between the campaigns
knocked Gephardt into fourth place--and out of the presidential
race.

But, while Gephardt supporters in the industrial unions hold both
McEntee and Stern responsible for their candidate's demise, they
largely give Stern a pass, because seiu's endorsement was the
result of a vote by its left-leaning executive board. McEntee is
not so lucky. Not only did he personally make the executive
decision to endorse Dean, his grounds for doing so were viewed as
hypocritical. Last May, McEntee told Roll Call that he wanted a
candidate tough on national security, going so far as to praise Joe
Lieberman for coming out "stronger, stronger and stronger on the
issue of Iraq and terrorism." But, when he cast his support with
Dean, he gave exactly the opposite rationale for endorsement,
praising Dean for his consistent opposition to the war. "[Dean's]
position on Iraq, when it wasn't sort of a favorite thing to do,
took a tremendous amount of courage," he told CNN's Judy Woodruff
in November. Such flitting from candidate to candidate--Kerry to
Clark to Dean--and rationale to rationale, made his motives look
dubious at best. "It was clear that he made his decision for
entirely Machiavellian reasons," says a Senate Democratic aide
close to the labor movement.

There's another reason McEntee could pay a higher price than Stern.
McEntee is chairman of the afl-cio's political committee, and,
therefore, in a position to be punished. Although this is an
appointed position--and Sweeney won't easily abandon McEntee, whose
members provide crucial support for his presidency--some of the
industrial unions are considering mounting an orchestrated movement
to pressure Sweeney to dump McEntee nonetheless. In McEntee's
stead, some of the industrial union leaders have suggested that
Sweeney install Harold Schaitberger, the head of the firefighters'
union--and one of Kerry's most stalwart supporters. "During a
presidential election, do you want your top political guy to be
Jerry after he threw Kerry over the side like that? What kind of
message does that send?" asks one labor official. Schaitberger
doesn't deny that some of his comrades have been touting him as
McEntee's replacement. "Jerry is a friend," he told me
diplomatically. "He's brilliant, but he can be very forceful. It's
fair to say that he invokes strong feelings." When the afl-cio
executive council convenes next month at the Sheraton Bal Harbour
in Miami, those strong feelings could conceivably force McEntee
from office.

Over the last 20 years, there have been few things the labor
movement and the centrist DLC have agreed upon. But Howard Dean's
implosion has brought the protectionist unions and the
free-trade-loving DLC together on at least one thing: their disdain
for pro-Dean heretics in their midst.

Though Dean was a certified New Democrat during his years as
governor of Vermont, his presidential campaign practically baited
the DLC into attacking him. Dean identified himself as the champion
of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party"--implying that the
DLC, and centrist Democrats in general, were quasi-Republicans.
Last May, Bruce Reed and Al From, the president and chairman of the
group, struck back in a high-profile memo: "What activists like
Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an
aberration: The McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by
weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home."
Dean used the DLC counterpunch as a pretext for escalating his
rhetoric further, explicitly denouncing the group as the
"Republican wing of the Democratic Party." His aides began mockingly
referring to it as the "Disappearing Lieberman Campaign."

Yet, even as Dean launched these attacks, he accomplished a stunning
coup: He managed to pry a handful of DLC stalwarts away from their
ideological home base. Three of the elected officials on the DLC's
"New Democrats to watch" list- -Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley,
Arizona State Senator Ken Cheuvront, and New York City Councilwoman
Eva Moskowitz--defected to Dean. In December, New Jersey Governor
Jim McGreevey endorsed him, too--a painful loss given that recent
electoral defeats in the South had left McGreevey as one of the most
prominent New Democratic governors. Months earlier, Ted Mondale had
joined the Deaniacs. Walter's son and a former official in the
Jesse Ventura administration, Mondale had been trumpeted by the DLC
as a symbol of how the centrists had wrested a younger generation
of pols from the grasp of paleoliberalism. More painful still was
the apostasy of Simon Rosenberg, head of the centrist fund-raising
group the New Democrat Network, who remained neutral in the race but
spent the fall and winter defending the Dean campaign against the
DLC's charge that it represented resurgent McGovernism.

But the most painful defection of all was that of Harvard Professor
Elaine Kamarck. Kamarck had made her name in the 1980s as a wonk on
the staff of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the DLC's
in-house think tank. During the '90s, she served as Gore's domestic
policy adviser, overseeing his reinventing- government initiative,
the quintessential Third Way program. Kamarck had been one of the
prime explicators of the DLC's electoral strategy. In 1989, after
the Michael Dukakis debacle, she co-authored an essay for PPI called
"The Politics of Evasion": "Liberal fundamentalists argue that the
party's presidential problems stem from insufficiently liberal
Democratic candidates who have failed to rally the party's
faithful," she wrote. "The facts, however, do not sustain this
allegation." But, over the course of last fall, Kamarck became one
of Dean's most vociferous defenders in the press, culminating in a
January column in Newsday endorsing Dean. As my colleague Jonathan
Chait has pointed out, this meant embracing a candidate whose
electoral strategy she had debunked 14 years earlier. (When I asked
Kamarck about the inconsistency, she replied, "Well, the nation's
changed. We're living in a fifty-fifty electorate. You can win
elections with an excited base.")

Kamarck's colleagues won't bash her on the record. But, with the
protection of anonymity, they turn harsh. One ex-Clintonite says,
"This town is famous for its opportunism, but it's a terrible
mistake to turn on your friends and join someone else's bandwagon."
Another prominent New Democrat complains, "As we criticized Dean,
Elaine rushed in to blindly defend him."

For the elected officials who endorsed Dean--like McGreevey or
O'Malley-- it's hard to calculate whether there will be long-term
costs. Some aggrieved colleagues suggest they have potentially
damaged their reputations in the eyes of the DLC-friendly network
of donors and perhaps could lose access to the p.r. services that
the DLC performs by trumpeting politicians in its publications and
conferences. But, for Kamarck, the costs are much clearer. According
to New Democrat sources, it is unlikely that she'll be invited to
speak at centrist Democratic conferences or to write in the New
Democrat journals that have been her prime stage for the last 20
years. "How can you think of her the same way again?" asks one
Democratic wonk.

This may explain why Kamarck is now trying to distance herself from
Dean, just like Daalder and McEntee. She now argues that she
"stopped just short of endorsing Dean"--not the impression one
would get from the column she wrote last month pronouncing Dean
"the strongest candidate against Bush that the Democrats have." But
it may be that you really can't go home again. When I mentioned
some of the derisive comments made by her New Democrat colleagues,
she showed just how thoroughly she had internalized Dean's
anti-establishment message. "That's stupid Washington bullshit,"
she said. And there was one other response she wanted to share with
her erstwhile friends: "Fuck 'em."

In official statements, the Kerry campaign echoes the conventional
wisdom that Democrats are too consumed by their desire to beat Bush
to spend much time hating one another. They predict a Democratic
Party lovefest in Kerry's big tent. "Put on your lipstick," the
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told me. "There's going to be a
lot of kissing going on." But many of the policy types who would
likely assume top positions in a Kerry administration still hope to
punish the opportunism of the erstwhile Deaniacs. "It's going to be
hard to forget," says one Kerry adviser.

Still, Brazile is basically right. The Kerry campaign isn't brimming
with hatred. In fact, many in its ranks feel a certain empathy for
the Deaniacs. After all, many of Kerry's advisers signed up for his
campaign in early 2003, thinking they had hitched themselves to the
clear favorite in the race. Then they watched for an entire year as
Kerry's numbers sank and sank. Ed Kilgore of the DLC, a Kerry
adviser who helped write the candidate's book A Call to Service,
says he was subjected to merciless ribbing. "People treated you
like you made a calculated decision to sign on with the
front-runner--so you got what you deserved." During Kerry's months
in the wilderness, Kilgore's comrades in the campaign sunk into
depression, discussing their post-campaign career options and
jokingly comparing their candidate to Edmund Muskie, another
derailed front-runner from New England. "It was a miserable, lonely
time," says Schaitberger. Then, after Kerry's Iowa win, his fortune
reversed again, and, in the blink of an eye, he went from also-ran
back to front-runner. As one Kerry aide puts it, "I always stick
out campaigns and lose. This is the first time I have ever
benefited from patience." Perhaps there is still hope for the
Deaniacs after all.

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