Winning Back America Excerpt: AFTER SCHOOL

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My parents encouraged me to get out of the house at a relatively early age. In the summers, this meant getting a job. My first summer job was as a counselor at a sailing camp at age fourteen. I was paid in French fries and hamburgers.

When I was sixteen, I worked with two other teenagers on the Big B cattle ranch near Belle Glade, Florida, which is a town eighty miles northwest of Miami on the southeast shore of Lake Okeechobee. We were two sixteen-year-olds and a fifteen-year-old out on our own in the world, for the summer at least. The three of us lived in a little apartment above the ranch office, and we worked ten hours a day, six and a half days a week, earning $1.15 an hour for the first six days and $1.25 on Sunday—at that time, Florida agricultural minimum wage.

Most of the time, we worked clearing land for the cattle ranch. On Sundays, our job was to spot the planes that were dusting crops or killing weeds. We’d stand on either end of a field holding poles to guide the prop plane as it swooped down and sprayed. I remember feeling the cool mist of the herbicide on my bare chest as the plane went over. At the time, we thought nothing of it.

Everybody else working the ranch was Cuban. Castro had nationalized the ranches in Cuba, and these workers had come to America, dropping down a notch in status in the process. The owner of the ranch in Cuba was the manager of the ranch in Florida, the forklift operator in Florida had been the manager in Cuba, and the ranch hand in Florida had been the forklift operator in Cuba. The manager was the only one who spoke any English, so we learned to speak some Spanish (a lot of which could not be repeated in polite company, as I learned a little too late).

Another year, I worked in the back office of a brokerage house on Wall Street. In the summer, the family moved out to Long Island while my father stayed in the city to work. When we got to be old enough, each of the Dean boys worked summers in the city and lived with my father. He liked having us around. In those days, the financial services industry was not yet computerized, and my brothers and I helped keep track of the voluminous paper records.

When I graduated from high school, my father wanted me to take an extra year before I went to college, as he wished he had done himself. I followed his advice and got an English-Speaking Union scholarship to a boys’ boarding school in England.

It was a great experience, but I found the restrictive reputation of English public schools to be well earned. I enjoyed the English dry sense of humor, but a British public school is pretty cruel and the rules are strict. When I was in England, I played rugby and basketball. At home, I was by no means a good basketball player, but in the land of “football” and cricket, I was Jerry West and Pete Maravich.

This time abroad did give me the opportunity to travel, which I’ve never forgotten. I went to Tunisia for Christmas, and visited Corsica and Sardinia. A group of us drove in a Land Rover to Istanbul through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in the spring of 1967.

To go off on my own for thirteen months at age seventeen was an eye-opening experience, and I thank my parents and the English-Speaking Union for it.

Winning Back America Excerpt: LEISURE READING

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One of the shortest answers I will ever give follows the question of what I like to do to relax. Whenever I’m home, we’ll have dinner together as a family, which is time that I relish. But I was never very good at relaxing.

When I’m at home, I work around the house. As far as television is concerned, I only watch the news. The books I read these days tend to be historical in nature, though I do have a weakness for physics—quantum physics, molecular physics, and astrophysics. I’m not a physicist at all; I don’t do the higher math and I couldn’t explain string theory, but I’m addicted to the “Science” section of The New York Times.

I’ll often be asked which books have affected me. One of the greatest political books I’ve read is Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The book is based on the life of Huey Long, the populist Louisiana governor and senator who was murdered in 1935. Long was originally chosen as a third-party candidate to siphon off votes from someone the bosses didn’t want, and he turned out to be a larger-than-life figure who dominated politics in his state. The lesson I took from the book was: Be careful what you wish for; you may get it.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird meant a lot to me. The book’s theme is racial justice in the South, and Atticus Finch is the paradigm of a guy who is willing to stand up for what is right. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey is an extraordinary voyage by a counterculture writer into an America of the past that wasn’t countercultural at all.

There is a book I think every American should read. It’s called Nickel and Dimed, and it was written by Barbara Ehrenreich. If you think the discussion about the travails of the middle class and the working poor is a liberal invention, you must read this book. It demonstrates exactly how hard it is to get by in America, and how much harder it is as a single mom. The author was a waitress, a chambermaid, and worked at a Wal-Mart; in the process, she found out how difficult it is to make ends meet when you have no benefits, no sick pay, and no chance to change your schedule if you need to. There are millions of Americans in the same situation. By and large, they don’t vote because they’ve given up on the system. The Democrats haven’t done enough for them, and the Republicans don’t care.

Harry S. Truman is my great political hero, and David McCullough’s biography is a truly magnificent book. I read Truman to Anne and Paul when they were in the second and third grades, and they both loved it. It is one of the books that has had the most impact on me in the last ten years.

Winning Back America Excerpt: IN THE BEGINNING

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When the campaign started, I had no idea how it was going to unfold. I couldn’t have imagined what we would build, how far we would come. I had no idea that we would begin bringing people back into politics in such great numbers.

It started in a single room. My first campaign office was in Montpelier, situated above a chiropractor’s office. In the beginning there was one staff person; by the time there were six, we knew we’d outgrown the one-room office with its metal folding chairs and antiquated equipment. I found a larger space in downtown Burlington, in an office I thought was enormous at the time. By winter, even that space was so packed that people were working on top of one another. In May 2003, the office moved to still larger premises.

The staff at Dean for America has been growing almost too quickly to manage. The stories of volunteers with no prior interest in politics showing up on the doorstep have become a cliché, but so many paid staffers did exactly that, starting out as unpaid volunteers.

Apart from the staff, there was an entirely different structure being built outside our supervision. Early in 2003, I learned of a website that organized “meetups”—gatherings of people with similar interests in a particular location. Several hundred people across the country had spontaneously begun to organize on the first Wednesday of every month, talking in coffee shops and restaurants about my campaign for president.

It was clear that the energy of these people had to be harnessed in a positive way, so my staff and I quickly began working to help nurture these independent supporters. At the meetups that I have attended, many of the supporters fit the profile of many of my staff members—they have never been involved politically, but there was something about our campaign that spoke to them. We were seeing a phenomenon where the effort was owned and directed by the people who supported it. In one supporter’s phrase, we have made this effort “people-powered.”

It is important to remember that I didn’t find these people; they found me. The Internet is a tool and it is also a community, linked across the ether. By and large, it is a community that believes that America has not lived up to its ideals.

Many of the meetings I’ve been to this year have been put together largely or entirely on the Internet. This summer, I saw another dramatic demonstration of how the Internet can mobilize grassroots support. Vice President Dick Cheney was holding a $2,000-a-plate fund-raising event in Columbia, South Carolina. I asked my supporters if, over the Internet, they could beat the money-raising efforts of the vice president. And they did. While Vice President Cheney attracted 1,500 people and raised $300,000, 9,621 people contributed to Dean for America and raised $508,640.31.

I believe that the Web is now proving to be a particularly valuable tool for people who care about their communities and who are engaged positively in the political process in the broadest sense. By its nature, the Internet is interactive, a place for discussion and debate and the free exchange of ideas and information. It is entirely different from talk radio, where information generally flows in one direction, from the host to the listener. Radio is interactive only to the extent that the host occasionally might take calls. In my experience, the Internet is a genuine forum for debate. People have talk radio on in the background; they log on to the Internet and participate.

Winning Back America Excerpt: A POLITICAL EDUCATION

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My first involvement in Vermont politics was strictly local: I helped start up the Citizens’ Waterfront Group with Rick Sharp, an attorney, and Tom Hudspeth, an environmental professor at the University of Vermont. There was an abandoned railway line that ran along the waterfront in Burlington. A plan existed to develop part of the land, but we wanted public access to the water, which was to be secured with a nine-mile bike path along the shore of Lake Champlain.

It was a grassroots effort: A few hundred members in our group applied pressure to two successive mayoral administrations. In the end, we won. The bike path was built, and the waterfront is now one of Burlington’s treasures. A jazz festival is held there every year, and eighty thousand people come to watch fireworks on July 4. Through the Citizens’ Waterfront Group, I got to know people in local politics. It’s one of the most important projects I’ve ever been involved in; it changed the face of the largest city in the state and made a public resource available to residents and tourists alike.

We carried the ideals behind the Citizens’ Waterfront Group into other communities after I became governor. We made sure that farms and unspoiled areas in the state will never be developed, and we set aside hundreds and thousands of acres of shorefront and forests, which will always be accessible to the public.

After I read the story about the Carter campaign, I went to Esther Sorrell’s house to introduce myself. Though she was thirty years older than I, we became good friends. Esther, her sister Peggy, and their friend Maureen McNamara used to meet every Friday and watch Vermont This Week, the local equivalent of Washington Week. I’d join the three of them. We’d eat the cookies they baked, watch the show, and talk politics. I received a thorough education in Vermont politics in the process.

It turned out I’d already met another sister, Audrey. When I first moved up to Burlington, I went to register to vote, and it was Audrey I saw. When I registered, I was an intern and I didn’t have any time to do anything other than sign my name. But by December 1979, I was in my second year of residency. I worked a lot with Esther, licking envelopes and that kind of thing. We wanted to win the Vermont primary to offset Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy’s home state. That’s exactly what happened.

Afterward, Esther asked me if I’d be one of Vermont’s representatives at the convention. “Why don’t you run for national delegate?” she said.

I replied, “I can’t do that; I don’t know anybody. I’ve only been in the state for two years.”

She said, “The kind of people who get to be national delegates are former governors and high-ranking people who haven’t done anything like the work you’ve done. I think you should do it.”

I repeated, “I don’t know anybody,” and she said, “Well, we do.”

So Peggy and Esther opened their Rolodexes, and I made a couple hundred phone calls. I would say that Peg Hartigan or Esther Sorrell had asked me to call and would you kindly support me for national delegate? I came in third after the lieutenant governor and after Esther herself. Being elected a national delegate helped me get started in Vermont. I owe a tremendous debt to Esther and Peggy as a result. I could never have done anything around the state without them. They knew everybody and introduced me to all of them. I think they also helped mold my politics. They were old-time ethnic Democrats who didn’t come from an elite background. They shaped me into a pragmatic Democrat. I was friendly with the younger, more liberal Democrats because they were my age, but I didn’t vote with them. I didn’t relate to their political sensibilities.

Esther Sorrell was truly the mother of the Democratic Party in Vermont. The Party had a somewhat anemic history in the state—there were no Democratic governors from 1853 to 1962. In 1958, Congressman William Meyer was the first Democrat Vermont sent to Washington. He lasted one term. (Pat Leahy, in 1974, was elected Vermont’s first Democratic Senator.) But there was nothing anemic about Esther. In 1958, the governor’s race was very close, and the Democrats lost only after a recount. The county chairman called in Esther and a group of women who’d worked on the campaign and said, “Girls, you worked really hard. How about we give you a party?”

And Esther said, “How about you give us some seats on the county committee?”—which at that time was an all-male group.

Esther was a state senator for ten years. She once made a speech on Good Friday

in favor of increasing the pathetic amount of money people on public assistance received. Her speech was so good that she actually changed some people’s minds, and the measure passed; it is a speech people still talk about to this day.

I went to the 1980 convention in New York City, where Ted Kennedy was pitted against Jimmy Carter. I would vote with the Carter people who were thirty years older than I was, and then I’d go out at night with the Kennedy people, who were my age. I got to be friends with both sides.

When I came back from the convention, Mark Kaplan, the state chair, called me and said he wanted me to be the chair of Chittenden County, the largest county in the state. The incumbent was very ill and had to step down. I tried to say no, but Kaplan said I was apparently the only person who could get along with both the Carter people and the Kennedy people, who comprised the two factions in the county. He said I had to do it, so I did.

As chair of the largest county, I started to get some notice. My job was to try to get Democrats elected to the state senate. After I had been doing that for two years, I decided to run for the state legislature. Someone who represented my district had decided to run for the senate, so I ran for the house seat she was vacating. The district was in Burlington, and it was the most liberal, working-class district in the state. I was running against a progressive. Bernie Sanders had won the mayor’s race in Burlington in 1981 by ten votes, beating the five-term Democrat incumbent. There was a very strong Progressive Party in the ward and no Republican Party whatsoever. So, interestingly, I ended up running against a candidate to my left in my first election.

I was living in a little apartment in the North End of town. Every day I’d leave work and drive directly to the ward to knock on doors. I knew if I went home first I’d find all sorts of reasons not to go back and pound the pavement. You’ve got to screw up your courage to go and knock on strangers’ doors. Every day I’d bang on a hundred doors. I knocked on every door in the ward twice over the summer and fall. One woman answered the door and said, “You must really want this.”

“Yes, I do,” I replied.

There was a wonderful woman in her mid-eighties named Fanny Gardner who was single and had lived alone all her life. She had a coal heater in her house, and she’d go down into the basement and dig out the coal to put in her stove. She loved to talk—really talk—and I got to know her fairly well. My opponent was a good guy, but we made sure Fanny was available when he was out knocking on doors in the neighborhood. She kept him busy for three hours at a time.

I won the election. It was 1982, and I had secured my first elective office.

Video of Dean's San Francisco Speech

Videographer Eric Predoehl has posted his edit of a 43 minute video of Howard Dean's appearance in San Francisco on March 18, 2004 at the Palace Hotel. You can download this video as a Quicktime, MPEG, or Windows Media file for free here. Or, if you don't have broadband, you can purchase it on DVD here.