Justin Raphael: Determining where Dean took a wrong turn

America always knew that Vermonters were a bit strange, but until the meteoric rise and fall of Howard Dean, their former governor, we never knew their fortunes were quite this odd. Leading the Democratic primary field last winter by almost 30 points, Dean struck out in the first 17 contests and, after a third-place finish in Wisconsin, dropped out of the race.

Some say that Dean, as the front-runner, suffered from the full brunt of daily, collective, adversarial criticism. Others, including Dean himself, put the onus on a media desperate to save a dramatic race. Maybe he was too much of a Ben and Jerry's candidate, the man for those teenagers whose cell phones get caught in their nose rings. And, lest we forget, there was "The Scream." All of these reasons are right, but all, in some sense, are as narrow as both Dean and his support.

The Dean campaign was, from the beginning, an outsider's quest. Never mind the paradox that is lambasting Washington so as to have its nicest address. Dean mixed populism -- "You have the power" -- anger -- "I want this country back" -- and Internet organizing to bring Americans new to or long divorced from politics into the fold. He harnessed a youthful, anti-establishment energy of hippie proportions; instead of acid, the Deanies had blogs, but the huge crowds were there just the same.

Then came the endorsements: Al Gore and Bill Bradley, exemplars of the Washington insiders Dean attacked, shoved the campaign into the mainstream and colored it with the stale liberalism most of us feared the once moderate favored all along. Suddenly, the McGovern comparisons made sense: Here was a candidate attacking government but seeking to expand it; excoriating politicians who said, "Elect me and I will solve all of your problems," and making that very promise; telling people they could be the saviors of their own freedom and its fullness of life, all the while demanding that they allow government to save them from themselves.

But Dean's disastrous tumble from political orbit was not a function of Al Gore's sunny disposition burning his wings off. It is even more ironic than that: He had the hubris to campaign against what he claimed his campaign was about. For a while, disillusioned and politically apathetic Americans of my generation bought into the rhetoric of a more human politics. However, in the end, Dean only served to alienate them further by running a campaign that sought to change government by making it more important; to make it popularly responsible by giving it more responsibility; to somehow enable government to nourish hopes by feeding itself.

In its politically useful conflation of a government by better people with a government of the people, a Dean presidency suggested the perpetuation of exactly the kind of inhuman, self-reflexive social behemoths both the New Left and the New Right, the grassroots ancestors of Dean's movement, fought against. To a certain extent, Dean was a victim of the very human government aegis he tried to claim, a cruel exemplar of the paradox that is an almost canonical liberal orthodoxy: As government becomes more expansive to deal with expanding demands of individuals, it begins to treat its constituents as anything but. In his complaints about "institutional pressure" against change, Dean forgot that he was the institution.

And yet even after dropping out of the race, Dean said that "we will, however, continue to build a new organization using our enormous grassroots network to continue the effort to transform the Democratic Party and to change our country." Never mind that nobody, if we can believe the voters, really wanted that kind of change for liberal populists, votes have always been accessory to their unimpeachably noble ends.

Americans, however, conservative and liberal alike, have since the 1960s been looking for something other than bigger government by people who know better. As Bobby Kennedy put it years ago, "the time has come when we must actively fight bigness and overconcentration, and seek instead to bring the engines of government, of technology, of the economy fully under the control of our citizens, to recapture and reinforce the values of a more human time and place."

Dean, then, in his ignorance of the people's choice, didn't so much change political disconnect as embody it; didn't so much change history as reprise it. He was, in the eyes of a young man who may have resembled a Deanie today, like the bureaucrats and do-all government experts: "They begin as tools, means to certain legitimate goals, and they end up feeding their own existence." That wasn't Barry Goldwater; it was Mario Savio, and the political individualism of him and his Berkeley radicals is an ironic political epitaph for a former Vermont governor whose mantra was "You have the power."

Howard Dean was right: The American people do want their country back. It's just they want it back from the elitists who took it in the first place.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.