TOLEDO, Iowa, 11 January 2004 — There is something missing in Howard Dean’s stump speech: Howard Dean. Unlike most of his rivals for the Democratic nomination, the former Vermont governor is running a campaign nearly devoid of autobiography.
This is the era of the Oprah-ization of American politics, in which sharing personal secrets or private anguish — Bill Clinton’s abusive, alcoholic stepfather, Al Gore’s accounts of his son’s automobile accident and his sister’s lung cancer — has become a campaign trail staple. Yet Dean is running — and so far succeeding — while playing the role of Oprah, not guest. During the last campaign, both Gore and George Bush appeared on Oprah’s program; this time the Dean campaign is the program. In a self-absorbed age, what better campaign message than to tell voters it’s about them, not the candidate.
At one level, it’s a relief to be spared the cringe-inducing confessional, the political use of the most intimate family tragedies. Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., makes a powerful point in linking his commitment to provide universal health care to his son’s childhood cancer, yet there is something unsettling in his rote recitation of the discovery of his son’s volleyball-sized tumor.
And Dean’s approach may be making lemonade from political lemons. For a candidate such as North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the personal story (son of a mill worker, first person in his family to go to college) is the policy (populist championing of working families); for Gephardt, emphasizing his blue-collar roots (son of a milk truck driver) helps dissipate his image as Washington insider. Dean’s privileged background doesn’t lend itself to that tactic: “I still believe in a place called East Hampton’’ won’t cut it as campaign biography.
Still, there is something strangely impersonal, even antiseptic about the Dean campaign. His family — his wife is a doctor with a palpable lack of interest in politics, his son is in high school and his daughter is following in her father’s footsteps at Yale — has been absent from the campaign trail, rhetorically and physically. Dean seems almost to recoil from the personal, even when the opportunity presents itself.
When a voter at a campaign event here praises Dean’s wife — “I’m glad your wife is your wife and I’m glad she does what she does and we don’t all need Laura Bush and Mommy in the White House’’ — Dean barely responds, calling quickly on the next questioner. Perhaps he saw in the comment a dangerous diversion into gender politics. But what did the wives in the audience make of a man who didn’t even offer up a few kind words about his own spouse?
Dean himself posits a fascinating theory about his avoidance of the personal in a profile in the latest New Yorker in which he describes his time in therapy during the early 1980s, when he was suffering “anxiety attacks’’ and “grief reactions over my brother’s death.’’ Charlie Dean had been killed in Laos eight years earlier.
“The fact that I’m the least autobiographical is very much connected with the fact that I’m the most passionate,’’ he told writer Mark Singer. “Experiences that I don’t have access to consciously are what drive me — personal experiences that I can’t tell you about because I haven’t processed them.’’
As Dean’s time on the couch probably showed, you don’t need to know much (not anything, Freud would argue) about your shrink to get the benefits of therapy. But picking a president is different. The experiences that have shaped a candidate’s character, the events that forged his beliefs, the depth and nature of his relationships with family and friends — all these things matter, more when voters select a president than when they make any other political choice. As much as Dean has built a campaign that is about his supporters, it will also, inevitably, be very much about him as well.
