10.01.2006
The Inside Agitator (NYTimes.com)
By MATT BAI
Published: October 1, 2006
Not all states are equal on an election map, and Alaska is one of those less populous states — like Kansas or Idaho or Alabama — that national Democrats almost never bother to visit. For one thing, just getting there presents a logistical ordeal: the journey from Washington takes as long as it would to reach, say, Nigeria, and even then you sometimes need a hydroplane to get around. And more to the point, there aren’t a whole lot of people to see once you get there. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a margin of 2 to 1 in oil-crazed Alaska, which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the House or Senate in more than 30 years. To put it another way, there were more Democrats in Central Park for the Dave Matthews concert a few years back than there are in the entire state of Alaska — all 656,000 square miles of it.
It seemed somewhat bizarre, then, when Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, chose to make the long odyssey to Alaska at the end of May, near what was the beginning of one of the most intense and closely contested national election campaigns in memory, when every other Democrat in Washington was talking about potentially decisive states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. It was also strange that no one in Democratic Washington seemed to know he was going. Although I had been following Dean closely for months, I found out about the trip accidentally and invited myself along — an intrusion that Dean seemed merely to tolerate. We met up first in Las Vegas, where he was making appearances with Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader. Dean, who enjoys his image as an unpretentious New Englander, is given to finding his own flights on discount Web sites, so it’s sometimes hard for even his own staff to track his itinerary. On the morning we left for Alaska, Dean went missing for a good half-hour. It turned out that he was in the business center of the MGM Grand, where he had been trying to figure out how to print his boarding pass but somehow ended up in an impromptu game of online backgammon with a guy who claimed to be in China.
Touching down in Anchorage, we were greeted by Jonathan Teeters, a 25-year-old former offensive lineman at the University of Idaho who had been hired to help the state party begin to organize Democrats. It took less than 10 minutes, as Teeters drove us through a pounding rainstorm to the state headquarters, for Dean, seated in front, to unleash his usual brand of havoc on a state unaccustomed to it. First, he absently asked Teeters what kind of radio interviews he would be doing during his 24-hour stay and was told that he was booked on the local Air America affiliate, the only liberal radio option in town. This is what party chairmen get paid to do — rally the faithful, collect their money and urge them to vote.
“Bull,” Dean snapped, using a slightly more elongated version of the term.
“Huh?” Chris Canning, Dean’s personal aide, suddenly looked up from a loose-leaf binder. He seemed to think he had misheard.
“I’m not going to do that,” Dean replied firmly, craning his neck to address Canning in the back seat. “I didn’t come all the way up here just to talk to people who already agree with us. I want to talk to everyone else. I’m fine with doing Air America, but we have to do something else too. Isn’t there some conservative show we can do?” Teeters warned that the few right-wing shows in town could get nasty for the chairman. “If you can set something else up too, great,” Dean said with finality. “Otherwise, I won’t do Air America.”
(More ... New York Times > New York Times Magazine > The Inside Agitator) ¶ 18:46
Published: October 1, 2006
Not all states are equal on an election map, and Alaska is one of those less populous states — like Kansas or Idaho or Alabama — that national Democrats almost never bother to visit. For one thing, just getting there presents a logistical ordeal: the journey from Washington takes as long as it would to reach, say, Nigeria, and even then you sometimes need a hydroplane to get around. And more to the point, there aren’t a whole lot of people to see once you get there. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a margin of 2 to 1 in oil-crazed Alaska, which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the House or Senate in more than 30 years. To put it another way, there were more Democrats in Central Park for the Dave Matthews concert a few years back than there are in the entire state of Alaska — all 656,000 square miles of it.
It seemed somewhat bizarre, then, when Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, chose to make the long odyssey to Alaska at the end of May, near what was the beginning of one of the most intense and closely contested national election campaigns in memory, when every other Democrat in Washington was talking about potentially decisive states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. It was also strange that no one in Democratic Washington seemed to know he was going. Although I had been following Dean closely for months, I found out about the trip accidentally and invited myself along — an intrusion that Dean seemed merely to tolerate. We met up first in Las Vegas, where he was making appearances with Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader. Dean, who enjoys his image as an unpretentious New Englander, is given to finding his own flights on discount Web sites, so it’s sometimes hard for even his own staff to track his itinerary. On the morning we left for Alaska, Dean went missing for a good half-hour. It turned out that he was in the business center of the MGM Grand, where he had been trying to figure out how to print his boarding pass but somehow ended up in an impromptu game of online backgammon with a guy who claimed to be in China.
Touching down in Anchorage, we were greeted by Jonathan Teeters, a 25-year-old former offensive lineman at the University of Idaho who had been hired to help the state party begin to organize Democrats. It took less than 10 minutes, as Teeters drove us through a pounding rainstorm to the state headquarters, for Dean, seated in front, to unleash his usual brand of havoc on a state unaccustomed to it. First, he absently asked Teeters what kind of radio interviews he would be doing during his 24-hour stay and was told that he was booked on the local Air America affiliate, the only liberal radio option in town. This is what party chairmen get paid to do — rally the faithful, collect their money and urge them to vote.
“Bull,” Dean snapped, using a slightly more elongated version of the term.
“Huh?” Chris Canning, Dean’s personal aide, suddenly looked up from a loose-leaf binder. He seemed to think he had misheard.
“I’m not going to do that,” Dean replied firmly, craning his neck to address Canning in the back seat. “I didn’t come all the way up here just to talk to people who already agree with us. I want to talk to everyone else. I’m fine with doing Air America, but we have to do something else too. Isn’t there some conservative show we can do?” Teeters warned that the few right-wing shows in town could get nasty for the chairman. “If you can set something else up too, great,” Dean said with finality. “Otherwise, I won’t do Air America.”
(More ... New York Times > New York Times Magazine > The Inside Agitator) ¶ 18:46
