While every political campaign has its share of youthful volunteers and energetic staffers, no campaign in history has energized-and tapped into-the "rising" generation quite like the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. As the former Vermont governor races toward the Democratic nomination, he has a cohort of Midd grads.
By Rachel Morton
Photographs by Kathleen Dooher
It's 11 p.m. on the last day of September, and as the minutes tick down toward midnight, a cluster of young people in the Vermont headquarters of the presidential campaign of Howard Dean work furiously. If they can raise another $299,000 dollars in the next hour, Dean will hit the $15 million mark for the end of the third quarter—a record for any candidate at this stage in the primary.
One buzzing cubicle in this beehive of activity is Midd Central, and in it are Michael Silberman '03, Ginny Hunt '03, and David Temple '05, who are working the phones and hammering out e-mails to friends and family. From this tiny patch of creative chaos comes a portion of the brains and brawn behind Howard Dean's incredibly successful campaign to empower and galvanize the previously apolitical, sometimes young, voters of America.
Silberman is national coordinator of the Meetup Program—the campaign's groundbreaking Internet-based get-togethers that first gained Dean the notice and admiration of politicians and pundits nationwide—and tonight he sits with his back to a blaring TV, oblivious to the growing mayhem.
Avid Deaniacs are accumulating, sprawling shoulder to hip in the tiny cubicle, waiting for the Tonight Show to come on. They don't normally gather for a TV break, and when they do it's rarely for Leno, but they're watching tonight because tonight their man, Howard Dean, will be a guest on the Tonight Show.
Throughout this nondescript office building in South Burlington, Dean volunteers and staffers have gathered in clumps, crowding into cubicles to watch television. When actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, Leno's first guest, makes her exit and the governor strides on stage, a roar erupts throughout Dean headquarters. A few staffers observe that Dean looks nervous. As he sits, his legs are stiff and uncrossed, and he seems to be gripping the arms of the chair, but Leno loosens him up, and Dean relaxes, getting a few laughs himself as he describes his legendary cheapness—which segues nicely into his record of fiscal conservatism. As Dean talks about the money he's raising through a grassroots campaign—how thousands of people have each contributed $82, unlike President Bush's big-bucks supporters—the room applauds again, delighted with Dean, delighted with themselves.
Soon after midnight, the entire staff wedges into a conference room, much too small for the swelling number of campaign workers. Campaign Manager Joe Trippi gives them heartfelt thanks for their hard work and tells them something they already know: they are making history. In fact, at various points during the evening, individual staffers have snapped pictures of their colleagues and friends, knowing this will be a night to remember.
After Trippi concludes, a six-foot cake is brought in. The message in icing reads, "You gotta believe." They believe. Boy, do they believe.
HBen LaBolt '03 believes, too, but on a sunny day in mid-September, he doesn't have the benefit of a raucous campaign office to pump him up. Not that it really matters; he has more than enough energy himself. The campaign's regional field director for the New Hampshire coast region, LaBolt has arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire, for 12 hours of pavement pounding and door knocking on the day of the mayoral primary. This effort is not about Dean; Dean won't be on the ballot. This is about getting out the Democratic vote. More important, says LaBolt, it will show the Dean organization how well organized they really are.
If the rank and file in the Manchester headquarters are in jeans and sneakers, guzzling soda and dropping pizza on their laps as they juggle the phones and the computers, LaBolt, as a representative of the campaign in the streets, looks more the part.
Anyone would open the door to this nice young man in clean khakis and a crisp Oxford shirt with a polo player embroidered on the front. He strides down the middle of the road, limping slightly—his shoes have not proven adequate to the miles he has to cover—clutching a bulging file in one hand and a cell phone in the other. This tidy middle-class neighborhood in Manchester, with its neatly landscaped lawns and tubs of mums in the last bloom of the season, has already seen a multitude of foot soldiers on the campaign trail. The mailboxes and doorways are bristling with political circulars and announcements, but LaBolt adds his own, believing there can never be too much of a good thing.
His phone rings.
"Hi, any op-o activity?" he asks, referring to the presence of the "opposition"—other Democratic primary candidates in Manchester. He helps a colleague identify a political operative, "She's the one in the terrible gray pants suit," and says he'll be back at HQ in a few hours.
He pockets his phone as he approaches a small brick ranch house. This is the Looney's house, he sees from the sheet generated by the campaign staff. These sheets have the names and addresses, as well as voting history, of all the Democrats in this precinct. LaBolt's job is to make sure these voters get to the polls.
The door opens and LaBolt introduces himself. "How are you?" he asks the older man standing inside the doorway looking lousy.
"Terrible," the man sniffs.
"That's too bad," LaBolt commiserates. "Have you voted?"
Most of the stops LaBolt makes end up at an empty house—it's the middle of the morning, after all, and most everyone is working. Usually the only people answering the door are sick or elderly. So why go to all this trouble? Why spend an entire afternoon canvassing an area that has been canvassed before?
"The primary," says LaBolt. This is a dry run for January's presidential primary in New Hampshire, he says. The Dean machine needs to know that its staff and volunteers know the drill. That they can, on that critical day, get out the vote.
LaBolt explains that, unlike himself, 50 percent of the people working for Dean have not had any political experience before. At Middlebury, LaBolt was president of the College Democrats his junior and senior years and participated in various political internships and summer jobs.
But most of the dozens of volunteers and staff now at the Manchester campaign headquarters have never done poll checking or exit polling or canvassing, he says, and they'll be leading their own groups of volunteers on primary day. And on that day, every vote counts.
"That's when you spend six hours walking around just to get one vote," LaBolt says. "They're that hard to get."
By the time LaBolt returns to Manchester campaign headquarters, he'll be limping in earnest and will have exchanged his inadequate shoes for flip-flops, despite the chill of the day. But he'll be cheerful and ready for more work. This January, five Middlebury students are spending J-term working with LaBolt at the regional field office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Nearby, Nick Lesher '03 is conducting exit polling outside the Webster School. Lesher is the area organizer for Strafford County in New Hampshire, and he, too, has arrived at Manchester to help get out the mayoral vote.
Lesher, from Washington, D.C., says that growing up in the hub of American government made him cynical about politics. But Howard Dean's campaign intrigued him sufficiently to delay his entrance into graduate school. It even lured him back from a semester in Turkey.
"This could be a pivotal moment for the country," Lesher says. "Last election the country was divided. Then September 11. This is exciting, especially from a political science standpoint. Dean has a vision, a belief in where he wants to take the country. I think he's the only guy to stand up to Bush effectively."
Lesher has been up since 4:30 a.m. and working since 5:30. During a torrential downpour, New Hampshire's experience of Hurricane Isabel, he got sopped bringing food and supplies to volunteers and staffers at the polls.
Standing in the sunshine outside the Webster School after lunch, Lesher's shirt has dried, as have his shoes, and he is stopping voters on their way out of the voting booths to ask them some questions, among them, have they chosen a presidential primary candidate yet? For an hour and half, Democrats file out and say they're supporting Gephardt or Kerry, or they're undecided. (Clark hasn't entered the race as of this date.) No one names Dean.
Lesher seems unaffected by this lack of support for his candidate. "It's about reinvigorating the Democratic base," says Lesher. "Getting people involved. The bottom line is, it's about coming together as Democrats and getting Bush out of office."
Though the Dean campaign might not have known from the outset that young people were going to embrace the governor's candidacy, they have certainly leapt to encourage and nurture the relationship.
Leading that effort is Ginny Hunt '03, who is outreach coordinator for Generation Dean, the youth outreach branch of the campaign. Hunt, who has traveled with Dean on several of his campaign swings, says that her job is to dissect what drives young people toward Dean. She says there has been a natural growth and evolution of most of the youth activity for Dean because of his straightforwardness, his pragmatism, and his stance on environmental issues and civil liberties.
"When they hear him," she says, "it's just amazing how he mobilizes young people. He's bringing people into the campaign who were never politically active before."
Generation Dean helps the youth movement grow by providing, on its Web site, a place for young people to discuss political issues and to group themselves around a shared interest—Snowboarders for Dean, Divas for Dean, Dog-Lovers for Dean. These groups often move the electronic discussions into face-to-face meetings, ostensibly for political discussions and actions, which Hunt facilitates.
This movement of the formerly apathetic into an army of young volunteers is something Ginny Hunt can relate to. Her interest in politics began early in the small Tennessee town in which she grew up. "There was a toxic-waste dump 10 miles from our house. It was seeping into our groundwater." The community mobilized to do something about it, and Hunt remembers thinking, "Oh, so this is how you get things done."
She learned more about community political action during her semester at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It was a turning point for her, she said, and it changed her focus from environmental studies to politics. "Politics there is part of their culture; it's powerful," she says. "It permeates their life."
Hunt was active at Middlebury in the College Democrats, and she volunteered for Dean's 2000 reelection and then again for the presidential campaign. She never thought the volunteer activity would turn into a job, but she's very much at home in the campaign culture.
"It feels so comfortable. It's young and energetic; very creative. Not what I expected from a presidential campaign. And it's not hierarchical. Dean strolls around and says hi to everyone. He sets the tone."
At one of the first organizing meetings of Generation Dean at the College, a half a dozen students gather at the Shannon Street apartment of Lauren Throop '04 and Jordan Sax '04. Anna-Britt Kasupski '04 and Andrew Feinberg '04 had worked to make the meeting happen, and though they'd sent out hundreds of e-mails and gotten dozens of assurances from fellow students that they planned to attend, by 7:30 it seems that this first organizing meeting is going to be mostly for the benefit of the organizers and a handful of students.
Which is too bad, because this is to be a special night for Dean supporters, meeting in thousands of locations around the country to participate in a giant conference call with Dean. Dubbed Dr. Dean's House Call, it could set a record for the largest conference call.
As small as this house party is, the students at Shannon Street are psyched at the attempt at a world record. They gaze at a plastic telephone accessory they've been given by Amy Morsman, a member of the history department and Addison County volunteer coordinator for the campaign. Looking like a space-age Frisbee, the telephone accessory, which sits in the center of a circle of students, chirps out a song by Melissa Etheridge, who, it turns out, will be introducing Dean tonight.
When Dean comes on, he is articulate and persuasive. He takes questions from house parties in Georgia and New Jersey, from Washington state and Memphis, Tennessee. He talks about global warming, AIDS, and healing the racial divide.
He reiterates his vision of the campaign as a revolutionary return to the way things ought to be: "This is the second American revolution; we're going to get a lot of people who have been demoralized back into the process. This whole candidacy is about changing Washington."
Dean's words resonate with the gathered students, who nod and applaud happily at the conclusion of the event. They discuss how they can bring more Middlebury students into the fold and how they can pop what they call "the Middlebury bubble" that seems to keep so many students self-satisfied and apolitical.
At the same time, says Feinberg, "There's an idealism here you wouldn't find at other schools."
On October first, the day after the late night of dialing for dollars at Dean Headquarters, the monthly Meetup is taking place at Nectar's bar in Burlington. There's a surprise in store for the several hundred citizens who've assembled to get together and to do some work for their candidate.
But first Michael Silberman stands on the little makeshift stage and tells the audience that they'd made history by donating a record $14.8 million. Though they've fallen short of their $15 million goal, they still have dwarfed the fund-raising efforts of all the other candidates, besting even Bill Clinton's mammoth war chest at this stage in the race.
"You rule, Michael!" someone yells from the back of the room, and somehow, here in the gritty Burlington bar that Phish made famous, the attractive but wonkish Silberman is as popular as a rock star.
Others speak, mostly just ordinary citizens who have volunteered and want to encourage others to do the same. What they don't know is that Howard Dean is about to arrive, a day removed from the Tonight Show and on the verge of starting a swing through college campuses across the country.
As Dean threads his way through the crowds at the bar, traveling in a halo of glaring lights from a phalanx of television cameras, the crowd shouts out its surprise and pleasure.
"We're going to empower people to take the country back from the right wing of the Republican Party!" Dean declares. "You have the power to take this party back and make it stand for something again!"
Hundreds of citizens are on their feet, erupting into cheers and wild applause. Silberman, Hunt, Temple, and other Middlebury staffers are right there with them—believing.
Whether or not Dean gets the Democratic nomination, Silberman says the experience of working on this campaign has changed him forever. "It has given me sense of hope that I never had before." Silberman says. "In both the power of people to really change things, and the power of people to organize and make a difference. I know it sounds kind of canned, but this is real."
Rachel Morton wrote "Comedy Central" in the fall 2003 issue of the Magazine.