Dean’s grass roots growing in Texas

Dean’s grass roots growing in Texas

By Ken Herman
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, August 25, 2003

On a Saturday morning in April, Glen Maxey, based at a folding table stocked with Howard Dean campaign materials, worked the hallway near the hotel conference room where the State Democratic Executive Committee was meeting.

On that day, long before Dean’s campaign became the buzz of the presidential race, Maxey had the twinkling eye of a man convinced he was on the leading edge of a wave.

The next step for Maxey was convincing other folks.

Four months later, with Dean due in Austin and San Antonio this evening, Maxey, former state legislator and longtime Democratic party operative, sees a mission accomplished.

“I’ve got an army,” Maxey, Dean’s Texas coordinator, proclaimed buoyantly at the keyboard of the computer that holds the information about the thousands of Texans signed on for the effort to support Dean.

For many Texas Democrats such as Maxey, who can hardly remember their last major victory, the Dean campaign is a rallying point, a way to simultaneously rekindle enthusiasm among the old-line faithful and spark new interest among the new voters and volunteers Dean needs to win.

Nobody knows where all this is heading, but Texas Democratic Chairwoman Molly Beth Malcolm, who is remaining neutral in the presidential primary, senses something happening.

“It does appear he has the most people working on the ground (in Texas) and the biggest volunteer group working for him,” she said. “And grass roots is worth a whole heck of a lot.”

Friday night, on a conference call hook-up with Dean backers at 90 “Bushwhack” house parties across Texas, Maxey talked to Dean about the Texas effort.

“I just want to report from the front lines out here in Bush country we now have over 20,000 volunteers in our Texas database,” Maxey said.

“Wow,” Dean said from New Hampshire. “Unbelievable. That’s great.”

The former Vermont governor will see some of those folks when he comes to Texas today to raise a little hell and a little cash in the back yard of the Texas president he hopes to unseat. An evening fund-raising event at Ruta Maya Coffee Co. in South Austin will be followed by a bus trip to San Antonio for a rally at the La Villita Assembly Hall.

It’s part of Dean’s four-day “Sleepless Summer Tour,” and the Texas stops are intended to highlight support in Bush’s home state.

Joe Trippi, Dean’s national campaign manager, is eager to make the case that some people who know Bush best like him least.

“Texas is a place where Democrats went through six years of him as governor and two and a half more as president,” Trippi said. “It was a pretty depressed group of Democrats that has become more and more energized.”

Early enthusiasm for Dean is palpable, as it was early in the underdog candidacies of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, previous less-than-mega-state governors who ousted incumbent Republican presidents.

It’s also the kind of early enthusiasm that helped launch the underdog candidacies of Michael Dukakis and George McGovern, Democratic ballot-box disasters relegated to history’s seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time folder.

A year or so ago, for most Texans, Dean was somewhere behind Ben and Jerry on the list of famous Vermonters. Now, he has a far more visible presence than many of the other — and once better-known — Democratic presidential contenders.

The question, reduced to Ben-and-Jerry terms, is whether Dean is just a flavor of the month.

Tapping the psyche

Longtime Democratic political consultant George Shipley, who is not publicly backing any of the presidential contenders, has watched the Dean wave roll
through Texas.

“The truth is, Dean has tapped into the psyche of a lot of different kinds of people who are very frustrated with the abuses of the Bush administration,”
Shipley said. “That’s a coalition that is pretty broad and pretty deep.”

Dean, by maintaining the most aggressive attack on Bush, has put himself front and center, according to Shipley, who is unsure of where this is headed.

“What happens with guys like Dean is, the first guy over the top catches the arrows. The second guy takes the turf,” he said.

Former Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro, a longtime Democratic leader and the party’s unsuccessful 1998 gubernatorial candidate against Bush, senses the Dean buzz. But Mauro, who backs U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt for president, takes a jury-still-out view of the Dean movement.

“Dean is capable of growing into a national leader with international stature. He’s just not there yet,” Mauro said.

For now, career politicos such as Mauro are less important to the Dean campaign than political novices such as Teri Sperry, an Austin freelance book editor, and her husband, Matt Hollon, an environmental engineer.

Sperry and Hollon opened their Central Austin home Friday night for a “Bushwhack” party, featuring the 15-minute conference call with Dean.

More than 50 people — some already backing Dean, others eager to learn more about him — showed up.

Until Dean came along, Sperry was an interested voter (always Democratic in presidential races, save for Ralph Nader in 2000) but never a campaign volunteer.

Sperry uses words commonly heard among Dean backers: “in touch with the general feeling out there,” “responsive,” “real change.”

“He really is tapping into a really strong feeling of anger out there that the control of our country has been taken away from the people and is in the hands of the big-money elite,” she said.

And like many Texans for Dean, she is driven by deep dislike for her former governor. Sperry, 39, blames Bush for wrong-way economic policy, “disdain” for civil liberties, “working with the energy industry to line their pockets” and establishing an image of the United States as “sort of the world’s bully.” Hollon, also 39, bemoans Bush’s “cowboy, shoot-’em-up foreign policy” and “the cronyism thing.”

Nearby, as Hollon prepared the guacamole, his father, Jack Hollon, a retired teacher, said he is intrigued by Dean but also is considering backing U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Jack Hollon, through his words, categorizes himself as a nontraditional Texas voter.

“My taxes should be going up, not down,” he said.

He is more traditional when he talks about the factors he is looking for in a Democratic nominee. Electability is a top concern, he said.

The topic came up in a question posed to Dean during the Friday night conference call.

“Many of us who support you first became interested in your campaign because you were willing to go on record against the war in Iraq,” Jane McNamara of Dallas
told Dean. “I think some of us are concerned that the anti-war label you’re carrying might make it tough to win down the road.”

The comment led to a question about Dean’s willingness to send American troops into battle. He talked about when he would — peacekeeping missions — and when he wouldn’t.

“I don’t believe in sending people over there because your daddy was wronged by the leader of the country, and we are paying a price for that now,” Dean said.

At the end of the call, Dean said his campaign is about more than moving into the White House.

“Once we get power, we’re never going to give it up again to the right-wing people who are running this country,” he said in wrapping up the kind of event crucial to his effort to guarantee that he is something more than a summer fling.

The frequently asked questions section of the instructions for house party hosts reminded them that enthusiasm is great, but money matters.

“Donate, donate, donate. This cannot be stressed enough,” hosts were told. “Dean’s campaign cannot be ignored as long as its grass-roots base is so large and dedicated, but in order to cross over to the mainstream, Dean must capitalize on his early success.”

Initial skepticism

Maxey, long on board for the dump-Bush effort, wasn’t always convinced that Dean was the man to do it.

About 18 months ago, at a Dean speech in Austin, Maxey reacted the way many folks did when they first heard Dean talk about his ambitious career plans.

“When he said, `I’m going to run for president,’ I looked at him and I thought, `You’re a nutcase. You’re from Vermont. You signed the civil unions bill.’ ”

While governor, Dean signed the Vermont measure allowing same-sex couples to legally register their relationships.

“But the more I heard him and talked to him and interacted with him, I thought, man, this guy can pull it together,” Maxey said.

Now he has seen many other Texans sign on with Dean.

“I think everybody comes to Howard Dean at a different place. Mine was off the civil unions activity,” said Maxey, the only openly gay Texan to serve in the state Legislature.

The anti-Bush sentiment in Texas, though clearly in the minority, is not to be discounted, according to Maxey, whose office at the local Dean headquarters includes a photo of Maxey with Bush at the Capitol.

“I thought George Bush was like anybody I’d see at my redneck family reunion: all my uncles who have just enough information and make their decisions off the last person they played dominoes with,” he said. “That’s how I felt about George Bush and his politics.”

Win or lose — Clinton or Dukakis — Maxey sees Dean as a no-lose candidate for Texas Democrats.

“This is the real thing,” Maxey said. “The kicker for me about Howard Dean is, I want to see the Democratic Party revived in Texas. What I see in Howard Dean is a catalyst for reviving an institution.

“There is so much residual effect of this campaign. In the last 10 years, all we’ve done is lick our wounds and pick up the pieces after an election. George Bush, unless I perform a walk-on-water miracle in this campaign, is going to win Texas,” Maxey said.

But here’s where Maxey embraces the dreaded McGovern analogy that is anathema to the Dean campaign.

“I see happening for a lot of people what happened for me in 1971,” he said, recalling when he worked in the McGovern campaign, which also included young folks such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Garry Mauro and others who later built careers in politics and public service.

“There’s hundreds of college kids organizing the San Antonio rally,” Maxey said. “They’re going to be state reps and state senators 20 years from now.”

http://www.statesman.com/asection/content/auto/epaper/editions/monday/news_f3943b9f374352670099.html