I have seen that talking point so many times. It is a way for the media to diminish both Gore and Dean, which they love to do. The only negative was that it scared them and the DC establishment, and they got better organized against him.
Here is a post by Jamie Wolf at Mother Jones. He was covering Dean's campaign at the time. The article is about Tom Vilsack, but it refers back to this aspect of Dean's campaign.
Lost in Iowa by Jamie WolfeYou may not care about being accepted by the cool kids, but if you want to be on the cover of a magazine, or the subject of a serious article touting your chances, or if you want to be mentioned positively in serious conversations between the political professionals and the serious potential funders or bundlers, it is these people, consisting of influential media insiders (many of them barely known to the public) along with professional political operatives and big donors, who determine your eligibility. Without their approval, you can't play.
For a while it seemed Howard Dean might break this pattern. The Vermont Democrat, who, to be sure, had gone out of his way not to ingratiate himself with this group, was utterly dismissed by most of them until August 2003. Somehow they just hadn't been able to accommodate themselves to the notion that this outside-the-Beltway upstart had been raising big money independently of their opinion of him, and was actually closing on the front-runner slot. When they finally emerged from denial, the response was one of alarm and resentment, this was a threat to the natural order of things. It's no exaggeration to say that, by December 2003, Dean had the cool kids in a state of near panic.I know this because I was covering the Dean campaign at the time, and you could sense the bewilderment and upset felt by this group of insiders on behalf of another candidate, a candidate they believed was, almost by droit du seigneur, entitled to the 2004 Democratic nomination—a candidate with whom most of them had long-standing ties, the sort of cozy familiarity people get from living in more or less the same neighborhoods and vacationing in more or less in the same places.
There is more. The Gore endorsement instead of "hurting" Dean because Gore was not respected....ended up pitting the insiders against him. They got organized.
By December of '03, a subset of these people had figured out what John Kerry was apparently just coming to realize for himself: that his early support of the Iraq War, rather than being a prudent strategic move, had become a serious liability while Dean's outspoken opposition to it, far from getting him in trouble—a group of former Kerry and Gephardt staffers hoping to stir those embers were running ads in Iowa and South Carolina featuring Osama bin Laden's face morphing into Dean's—had turned out instead to be one of the strongest aspects of his campaign.
So, with the Iowa caucuses looming, and—the final straw!—Al Gore having given Dean his endorsement, Kerry asked Al Franken to convene some of the group at Franken's New York apartment, so that Kerry could attempt to justify for them his aye vote on the Iraq War resolution the previous October. Williams Rivers Pitt, then managing editor of the online newsletter truthout.org and now editorial director of Progressive Democrats of America, described the scene in a Truthout account the following week: "The crowd I joined in Franken's living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for The New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for The New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time magazine; Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek; Jeff Greenfield, senior correspondent and analyst for CNN; Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times; Eric Alterman, author and columnist for MSNBC and The Nation; Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist/author of Maus; Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post; Fred Kaplan, columnist for Slate; Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate and author; Jonathan Alter, senior editor and columnist for Newsweek; Philip Gourevitch, columnist for The New Yorker; Calvin Trillin, freelance writer and author; Edward Jay Epstein, investigative reporter and author;
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who needs no introduction."And the final touch, about the scream. Many were in a position to bring the truth out about the directional mic. They did not.
Perhaps most egregious of all, the sophisticated television and Internet people who'd been at Al Franken's lunch could have put the kibosh on the ridiculous Dean Scream business right away, and they didn't. It would have been abundantly clear to them that Dean was holding a crowd-filtering mike, which amplified his lost-in-the-noise shouts into the ravings of a madman—people such as Iowa Senator Tom Harkin standing close to Dean were mouthing words and cheers of which TV viewers could hear not a whisper. Instead the cool kids, who were on air and online at the time, let "the Scream" grow into the catastrophe it became, to the extent that Dean was finished off that night.
I get so angry when I see posts here implying that Al Gore hurt Dean with his endorsement. It is stooping lower than I expected DU to stoop, even as we keep lowering our expectations.
It was an event that shook the establishment. The feisty Vermont governor who came from nowhere was close to being the nominee, and it was an intolerable situation for them.
It did not hurt Dean, and the Gore endorsement if indeed it does come, would be good for Obama as well. Saying otherwise is just plain lying.
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