The Dean Scream: An Oral History

By Jack Holmes

Jan 29, 2016

Jan 29, 2016

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On Monday, Iowans will flock to their local churches and school gyms to participate in the Iowa Caucus. By day's end, both Democrats and Republicans will have a winner, and a bona fide frontrunner for their party's presidential nomination. Some candidates' chances will essentially be cooked. But it's safe to say that the day will not end as remarkably—or catastrophically—for any of them as it did for Howard Dean twelve years ago.

By January of 2004, the American left's revolt against President George W. Bush was in full effect. Simmering resentment from the contentious election of 2000 was brought to a boil by seething outrage over the War in Iraq. Left-leaning voters and grassroots activists were in search of a standard-bearer. They found one in Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, who steered the Democratic field—and the nation—toward opposition to the war, all the while rocketing up the polls.

But then came the Iowa Caucus. The frontrunner for so many months, Dean came in third place behind John Kerry and John Edwards, shocking his supporters. But the damage was far from finished: In his concession speech in a Des Moines hotel ballroom that night, Dean tried to make himself heard above a raucous crowd of thousands. In a speech that was largely ad-libbed, he began shouting a list of states the campaign would go on to conquer in the months to come. And then he came to that immortal, cartoonish crescendo: "YAHHHHHH!!!"

The Dean Scream, as it became known, spread almost instantly across the media landscape. It played on loop on cable networks and local stations alike. Leno, Letterman, and Conan all had their fun with it, and Dave Chappelle wrote a skit that immortalized the moment for any young adults who had still somehow missed it. Dean's cry became the stuff of legend. It was the Internet's first-ever political meme, remembered as the moment We, The People decided that Dean was unfit for the Oval Office.

But if you listen to the people who were actually there—campaign staffers, reporters covering the campaign, Dean himself—they'll tell you a different story. We did. And along the way we began to question whether the Scream was really what sunk Dean's campaign; whether he was even its biggest casualty; and most of all, whether the Dean Scream was all that it seemed.

THE LEAD-UP TO IOWA

NICCO MELE, Head of Digital Ops for the Dean Campaign: I joined the campaign in April of 2003, and by June, it took off like a lightning bolt.

HOWARD DEAN: That campaign changed everything in Democratic politics. The 50-state strategy came from that campaign. Obama's plan came from it. It changed politics forever.

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William Plowman/Getty

KATE ALBRIGHT-HANNA, CNN correspondent: I remember seeing him at events, especially on the Sleepless Summer Tour [Dean's 6,147-mile, 10-city political revival tour] in August of 2003. That was when he was taking off, and I got chills from seeing him speak and seeing the audience react to him. I remember at an event in Idaho he grabbed the flag and said, "We're going to plant it in the ground, and we're not going to let them take this flag away from us." That's the sort of thing that really got people excited. Going into a red state and saying, "We're not going to take it for granted that the red states have the flag and we don't."

MELE: He gave this speech at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in which he was cribbing from [late U.S. Senator] Paul Wellstone. It was this fiery speech where he said, "What I wanna know is why so many Democrats are voting for the War in Iraq. And what I wanna know...and what I wanna know..." And he closed with this really intense, "And I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." That got turned into a dance mix.

By the fall of 2003, Dean rose to dominate the Democratic field with a potent brand of left-wing populism and strident anti-Iraq War rhetoric. His campaign harnessed the Internet to reinvent grassroots fundraising and benefit from some of the first viral political moments. He topped nearly every national poll, and held significant leads in Iowa and New Hampshire.

ADAM MORDECAI, staffer on the Dean Campaign's Iowa Internet team: We felt like we were invincible. He just kept winning poll after poll. He was on every magazine cover.

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Mario Tama/Getty

ERIC SALZMAN, CBS reporter travelling with the campaign: They cultivated this rock-star image. But in the end, it came down to two things: organization versus perception. What they built in Iowa was always a little more show than substance. And the polling numbers weren't based on good old-fashioned groundwork organization.

HOWARD DEAN: The numbers weren't holding up, and Kerry was doing a great job.

MELE: Howard, as the frontrunner, came under concerted attack from all parties in the 90 days prior to Iowa and New Hampshire. You had Kerry and Gephardt and Edwards, and you had shadowy PACs with a lot of money.

DEAN: Clark, Kerry, Lieberman, and Gephardt, there were four candidates that were coordinating their attacks. That's always tough.

JOE TRIPPI, Campaign Manager: The other candidates were on conference calls every day to decide how to coordinate attacking us. That's been documented.

DEAN: One of the things we did wrong, which I didn't know about at the time, was go after Gephardt. In a multiple-way race, if two people start fighting, they both go down. And we both did. That was a mistake, and unfortunately I didn't know about it. I mean, I didn't know what was on TV, because by that time the campaign was in some chaos.

MORDECAI: There was all the internal dysfunction of the campaign itself. And our VAN system—our voter access file system—was so horribly broken. It was from this independent contractor that they hired way back when they didn't have any money. And we had all these crazy Dean fans calling people, but the system wouldn't update the lists. So Iowans would get twelve, fifteen calls a day from rabid Dean supporters. We probably chased off half our support that way.

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AP Caption: Adam Mordecai, webmaster for the Howard Dean campaign in Iowa, left, and programer Aaron Welch work on the campaign's web site at Dean's Iowa campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004.

Charlie Riedel/AP

ALBRIGHT-HANNA: Even though the Dean campaign's Iowa operation was terrible, and they had so much infighting in their campaign, they were still ahead. But then Dean said that capturing Saddam Hussein didn't make us safer, and everybody jumped all over that, thinking that was a huge gaffe. And other campaigns had already been saying that Dean supporters looked like the bar scene from Star Wars. So there was this whole narrative that the other campaigns were pushing, that Dean was crazy and his supporters were insane.

TRIPPI: In Iowa, it was pretty clear we were unraveling, so I was praying that it would somehow hold together before caucus night, that the floor would not collapse on us until the day after. Then we'd have some momentum from a win going into New Hampshire and no one would know it was collapsing.

DEAN: We of course were still hoping to win. But I had felt for about three weeks that we were losing our position.

TERI MILLS, grassroots organizer: I was very optimistic. I think it was the general feeling, just based on the crowds that Governor Dean had drawn, and the enthusiasm.

MELE: I inhabited two brains at once. I knew from the polling, and from the internal discussions in the campaign, that we were not going to come in first and we were probably not going to come in second. But I also was a true believer, and eating the dog food. I profoundly did not want to believe that.

THE CAUCUS

DEAN: I don't honestly remember what I did that day. I probably worked all day, went to the polling places and shook hands with people, and when the caucuses actually started, I suspect I holed up in some place that was nearby the headquarters.

TRIPPI: I was at headquarters with Paul Maslin, the pollster, when we figured out it was over, officially. Someone was on the line with Paul, and Paul looked up at me and said, "Should I tell him?" And I said, "Yeah, make sure he knows." And whoever was on the line told Howard.

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Shaun Heasley/Getty

ZEPHYR TEACHOUT, Head of Online Organizing, the Dean Campaign: I was on the ground in Iowa, and I could tell things weren't going that well. At that convention hall, it was just awful seeing the numbers coming in. Far worse than we'd feared.

John Kerry won the Iowa Caucus. John Edwards was second. Howard Dean came in third.

THE SPEECH

MILLS: We went over to the hotel. And the ballroom, where the party was being held, was absolutely jam-packed. I mean you couldn't even move, it was so crowded. And people were so excited and looking forward to boarding planes to go to New Hampshire.

TRIPPI: We walked into the room and it's 3,000 people, and they're out-of-their-minds crazy, a euphoric celebration for Howard Dean. One of the biggest celebrations that I'd ever seen in my entire time in politics.

MORDECAI: I went to the venue to join in with everybody else, and then accidentally got really drunk. One of my friends recommended I get on stage and get everybody amped up. So I did.

As the capacity crowd was warming up, Dean's team was backstage deciding how to proceed.

TRIPPI: The fact of the matter is that most of America only tuned in to see who Howard Dean was the night of the Iowa Caucus. You have millions of Americans watching who have no idea who you are. If the cameras are on you that night, it's your best shot to introduce yourself to America. So that was the plan—win, lose, or draw. But you can't predict how things go once the bus rolls up and he gets out there.

DEAN: Trippi said, "They're down, go out there and give 'em hell." I thought it was a great idea and I went out and gave 'em hell. It was a lot of fun.

TRIPPI: The first person he saw on his way to the stage was [Iowa Senator] Tom Harkin. He asked Harkin what he should do. Harkin said, "Why don't you just throw your jacket off and let her rip." Which, you know—Harkin was just trying to buck him up, not anything. And if you go watch the tape, he walks up on the podium, turns around, throws his jacket over to Tom Harkin and starts feeding off the energy of the crowd.

SALZMAN: The communications director, Patricia Enwright, comes around and preps the press. "Get ready guys, he's going to be firey." I don't remember if someone told me before or I learned later, but this was also in part because of Senator Harkin's advice. So Patricia comes out and is like, "Yeah, he's going to be firey." They made the decision to play to the room.

MILLS: The governor walked in, and of course the room just went bananas. It was like a rock star. And we all could barely even hear him talk.

MORDECAI: I was near the front of the stage. It was like a rock concert. You couldn't hear a word. We couldn't hear anything he was saying, basically.

SALZMAN: I can't tell you how many Howard Dean stump speeches I watched. You get to the point where you can recite the lines along with him. There's crescendo lines built into those speeches, and then you wait for applause. Here, he was working himself up. He was giving this ad-libbed pep talk and he started naming the states—"And then we're going to go to New Hampshire, and then we're going to go to South Carolina. " He's looking down at the crowd, and he got that neck skin roll because he'd gained so much weight during the campaign. So it is an unflattering look. And he gets to this crescendo in his tenor, and he has no line to land on. So he goes, "BYAH!" and then chuckles to himself.

DEAN: I was working 20 hours a day, I'd get 4 and a half hours of sleep. I put on 20 pounds because I was eating Peanut M&Ms all the time.

MORDECAI: He only had a few shirts, and they were all too small for him. And so they would make his head look like it was about to explode if he worked up any emotion at all. It would just tighten around his neck and he'd turn bright red.

TRIPPI: The problem was that it was a unidirectional mic he was speaking into, which is meant to make sure that television stations can hear him and not have the crowd roaring so loudly the people back home can't hear the candidate. But that, of course, creates a situation where the CNNs of the world and their audiences hear a guy yelling over a crowd that they can't hear.

TEACHOUT: Here's how I think about a unidirectional mic: Picture yourself in a bar. You walk over to a friend you haven't seen in a while and ask them about their job, with all the noise around. Then imagine the noise shuts down, but they're talking over all that background noise that isn't there. It wouldn't sound pretty, but it would be fascinating to watch.

The speech as it looked—and sounded—from within the room:

THE FALLOUT

ALBRIGHT-HANNA: The venue was crazy. There was a sense that it was really loud, but it just felt like a typical rally. Nothing out of the usual happened. Nobody remembered a moment happening at all.

DEAN: Not only did I not have any sense something happened; there were 75 print reporters in the room, and I've never talked to one that had any sense that anything unusual was going on.

TRIPPI: Nobody knew what happened until we were all hanging out at the bar afterwards with press, having a beer. And looking up and seeing, repeatedly, this scene of Howard over and over again. So you looked up and went, "What the? What's going on?" I realized as soon as I saw it that it wasn't going to be good.

ALBRIGHT-HANNA: We went straight from the event to get on the plane to New Hampshire. I remember sitting next to another reporter from USA Today. It never came up. None of the reporters on the press plane were talking about it. We landed in New Hampshire, and Dean came out and did his speech there, and I met up with my associate producer at CNN, and we got into the car and she was like, "What do you think about what happened?" And I said, "What happened?"

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Paul Sancya/AP

SALZMAN: There were people in the room who were trying to report the story based on what they saw, and their editors were saying, "No, that's not the story." It was an interesting example of the power of television, because editors said to their reporters, "Hey, I saw it. I watched it on TV. I know what happened." And the reporters were trying to say, "No, it was different if you were there." And the editors were like, "Hey. I'm telling you I know what the story is, and this is what we're reporting."

DEAN: By the time I got to New Hampshire, the staff was worried about us, because they'd seen some early stuff from Fox News and stuff like that. But I still didn't worry about it.

In the four days that followed the Iowa Caucus, according to the AP, national television stations—network and cable—played the clip of what became known as "The Dean Scream" 633 times. The number of times it aired on local stations has never been determined, but must surely be in the thousands.

The clip also morphed seamlessly into a pop-culture phenomenon. It was targeted mercilessly by Conan, Letterman, and the late night brigade. It eventually became a (hilarious) skit on Chappelle's Show. And it grew to be, by most accounts, the very first industrial-scale political meme.

MELE: I remember walking in the next morning and being like, "Oh, fuck." There were bits of it starting to go viral in non-flattering ways. Facebook didn't exist, YouTube didn't exist. This was in the dark ages of the Internet. And yet the experience of Howard Dean's candidacy, for me, was largely doing small things that took off. And they often helped, and it mostly wasn't the campaign's doing. But this was something that took off that was not so flattering. It did not buoy the campaign.

GARRETT M. GRAFF, Deputy National Press Secretary: It was the first genuine viral moment of video on the Internet, even before YouTube existed.

MORDECAI: The remixes, and the sound clips, and the whole nine yards. I went into the seven cycles of grief.

ALBRIGHT-HANNA: I remember going into the Dean campaign headquarters [in Burlington, Vermont] after CNN had been airing the Scream on a loop, and one of the Dean staffers told me that he was going to douse himself in gasoline and run into CNN's offices and set himself on fire.

MELE: I remember, almost right away, a backlash. People saying, "This is the media trying to screw Howard Dean." It was immediate. So it both went viral in an immediate way, but also there were people defending it.

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Alex Wong/Getty

GRAFF: It was all consuming in the news, but at the same time, we understood very clearly that we had this looming deadline of the following Tuesday in New Hampshire. And we needed to win New Hampshire.

TRIPPI: We believed the only thing we could do was keep campaigning in New Hampshire. It was clear we were not going to knock it down—the tape was too good. Every station kept running it over and over again, every fifteen minutes for that entire week. And it wasn't going to go away.