Gov. Dean's $100 Revolution Is Here

by Larry Dudley [courtesy of Blog for America]

Lost in the coverage of the remarkable February fundraising totals of both the Obama and Clinton campaigns was a real turning point in American politics-- the full realization of the "$100 Revolution"  Gov. Howard Dean called for in November 2003.

On the 18th Dean sent out a fundraising message, not in itself an unusual event, but one that would eventually change the parameters of American politics.   
Beginning in the early 1960s television advertising increasingly dominated American politics.   Beforehand, campaigns had raised money, and often lots of it, but there were practical limits to how much a campaign could spend.   They could open large numbers of local offices, fill them with barrels of free buttons, boxes of bumper stickers and burden mailmen with bales of letters.  But, fundamentally, vIctory ultimately depended on a candidate's supporters.

Television changed all that.   There was almost no limit to the amount that could be spent on TV advertising.  A bizarre "arms race" resulted, where a candidate's political credibility seemed to depend on his or her dominance of the airwaves.   If you were drowned out, news coverage usually faltered as well.   

Political leaders drifted away from their supporters and towards large donors, which was most productive.    As a result, where the Democratic Party had once mainly represented ordinary working Americans, it increasingly became a second corporate party, where the interests of  wealthy donors came first.   This era peaked during the Presidency of Bill Clinton and DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe.   As NAFTA or telecom "reform" demonstrated, America now had two elitist corporate parties who mainly differed on social agenda issues like abortion rights. 

It's no wonder the Democratic Party nearly collapsed into irrelevance in the late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century.   As Harry Truman famously said, give people a choice between a real Republican and a fake one, they'll take the real one every time.   Dean's campaign manager Joe Trippi later aptly defined this period as the Era of Television Politics. 

This was the prospect Dean faced when he began his campaign after the 2002 election debacle.