Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
03. Howard Dean with Heath Eiden
60 Plays1 year ago
During the summer and fall of '03, leading up to the 2004 presidential race, there was one candidate who emerged as the unlikely frontrunner: Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean is remembered today for an unfortunate audio gaffe we now know as the "Dean Scream," but before that fateful night in Iowa, he was the One To Beat because his campaign harnessed the power of the early Internet to out-fundraise his opponents and organize all over the country. Helen speaks with Heath Eiden, a documentary director whose film Dean and Me: Lessons From An American Primary is a fascinating time-capsule into 2003 politics, the Dean campaign, and Heath's own endeavor to enmesh himself within the Dean political machine.
Watch Dean and Me: Lessons from an American Primary on Vimeo
Song of the week: Year 3000 by Busted
Class of '03 is an independent production hosted, written, and edited by Helen Grossman.
If you have a memory or an idea for the show, please call in at 724-CLASS-03 and leave a voicemail or send an email to classof03pod@gmail.com.
Follow Class of '03 on Instagram @classof03pod or visit our website classof03podcast.com.
Our logo is by Maddie Herbert of @dame.studio and theme song is by Luke Schwartz and Evan Joseph of Sawtooth.
Recommended
Transcript
Dreams of a Cooking School in Vermont
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi, I'm Heath Eiten. And I guess this all started when I moved up here to Vermont with my wife, Sandra. We had a baby boy. His name is Atticus. Sandy always wanted a cooking school. So we ripped out the old farmhouse kitchen and built her a new one.
Following Howard Dean's Presidential Campaign
00:00:26
Speaker
You ready for a beer, Heath? Yeah. Like any other new parents, we bought a video camera.
00:00:35
Speaker
It says it's recording, but then it says blank where the minutes are. Would it record? And then our neighbor down the road decided he wanted to be president. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean has been running for the Democratic presidential nomination for a couple of months now, but today he made it official. So I decided to follow Howard Dean.
Impact of 2003 and Howard Dean's Influence
00:01:27
Speaker
Hi, and welcome to the Class of 03, podcast about the year 2003 and all the ways it still affects us today. I'm Helen Grossman, your host slash classmate, and this is episode three, Howard Dean with director Heath Iden. So, do you remember what you wanted to be in 2003? Who you wanted to become? How you envisioned the future?
00:01:55
Speaker
I recently found my yearbook from that year, and in it, I said I wanted to become a journalist. So does making a podcast count as journalism? I don't know. It's up for debate, right? It's likely that 2003 Helen would have said, ew, what's a podcast?
Flash Mobs and Network Culture
00:02:16
Speaker
There were many different forecasts and fights for the future taking place in 2003. Wired magazine actually dedicated a 60 page special report on the wifi revolution in May of 2003. There was another forecast for the future that year based on a new trend that started on June 17th. That day between 727 and 737, the very first flash mob took place in a Macy's in Manhattan.
00:02:47
Speaker
In this legendary flash mob, about 100 people showed up in the home furnishing section and surrounded a $10,000 rug. The flash mobbers all told salespeople that they lived together in a free love commune and were looking for a love rug. After 10 minutes of discussing the rug amongst themselves and with salespeople, the flash mobbers dispersed very quickly.
00:03:13
Speaker
Through text messages, emails, and blogs, the crowd had all concocted this plan to meet and executed it so successfully that flash mobs in other cities immediately followed and they became a major, major part of the summer of 03. On July 24th, over 300 people flash mobbed a bookstore in Rome. On August 3rd, a flash mob in Berlin began at 601 PM with participants screaming, yes, yes, into their phones.
Risks of Corporate Exploitation of Flash Mobs
00:03:43
Speaker
for breaking out into applause. Later that month, 35 people did the twist in a major intersection in Vancouver. In an article in the New York Times from August 24th, 2003, Rob Walker wrote that flash mobs offer us a lesson about the evolving nature of networks. What flash mobs do, he wrote, is make networks tangible.
00:04:12
Speaker
Flashmobs offered this glimpse into the future of communication, into a world in which wireless devices allowed people to immediately communicate with each other at any time and organize. And there was this potential with this combination of communication, location awareness, organization that could lead to a new kind of cooperation.
00:04:45
Speaker
There's a warning, though, in the New York Times piece, and it's articulated via the leading chronicler of flash mobs at the time. There's a blog called, and we love this, cheesebikini.com. Cheesebikini warned flash mob participants not to become sheep to corporate interests. A crowd, after all, can be a valuable commodity.
00:05:09
Speaker
In the New York Times article, Walker writes, flash mobs in their apparent pointlessness have steered so conspicuously away from being exploited. For now, mobists serve the cause of no cause. Flash mobs might be a peek into the future of crowds, but also, perhaps, a last glimpse of their good old days.
00:05:32
Speaker
If flash mobs were one demonstration of the evolving nature of networks, there was another unlikely embodiment of that in 2003.
Dean's Campaign and Social Networking
00:05:42
Speaker
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. Howard Dean, who had been governor of the small but very lovely state of Vermont, announced his candidacy for president on June 23rd, 2003. But he already had a groundswell of grassroots support.
00:06:01
Speaker
that really was the foundation of his campaign. And this organization was primarily built through a network of hundreds of bloggers and a relatively new site called meetup.com. Dean quickly became the front runner of the race by building a social network on the internet, which at the time was a totally revolutionary concept. In early 2003, Howard Dean had gone to a meetup in New York City.
00:06:27
Speaker
of his supporters, and there were 300 people there. At the time, the leading group on the site was a club for witches, which had 15,000 members. That's very impressive.
00:06:40
Speaker
Howard Dean's meetup group in early 2003 had 3,000 members, but by March had overtaken the witches. It was an exponential and very rapid curve. A 2004 article in Wired notes that Dean's new supporters contributed money, piles of money, one respect from the media, and the media attention pushed meetup numbers higher.
Progressive Stances vs. Moderate Governance
00:07:06
Speaker
Every campaign depends on a feedback loop.
00:07:09
Speaker
Today, Howard Dean is remembered for one terrible, unfortunate audio mishap, now known as the Dean Scream. But in 2003, he was a real contender and a promising candidate. Who was Howard Dean, though?
00:07:24
Speaker
What was his vision for the future of the United States? He was running for president after all, the most audacious thing you can do. During the summer and fall when Howard Dean was the front runner for the nomination, he was painted by other candidates as the most liberal, most progressive. He was an early and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq. He advocated for universal health care.
00:07:49
Speaker
He said that all states should find a way to ensure gay couples have the same rights as straight ones. Voters also responded to him because of his straight talk. A New York Times article about the unlikely front runner claimed that several voters loved Dean's willingness to say, I don't know, when asked if photographs of Saddam Hussein's dead children should be published by news outlets. The truth is more complicated than that. Of course, it always is.
00:08:17
Speaker
Howard Dean was seen in Vermont actually as more moderate centrist. In his time as governor, he cut taxes. He favored a very incremental approach to healthcare reform. He regularly embraced business interests and even won a top rating from the NRA. He was criticized in the LGBTQ community for signing civil unions into law, but not gay marriage.
00:08:42
Speaker
and he did so only by pressure from the state Supreme Court. It's also worth mentioning that Howard Dean, a Yale-educated white man, was governor of one of the least populous, whitest states in the country. So it was always a question how his liberal bona fides from Vermont could translate on a national scale.
00:09:03
Speaker
Howard Dean took the plunge into the presidential race and his very public, mercilessly mocked downfall was a painful outcome of his candidacy. But you never know when you take the plunge, how the risk will pay off, or when.
Documenting a Historic Campaign
00:09:22
Speaker
Our guest today took a risk in 2003 when he decided to make a documentary film about Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Heath Iden made a movie called Dean and Me, Lessons from an American Primary.
00:09:36
Speaker
The very first lines from the film are the ones that you heard at the top of the episode. Heath tells us the viewers the story of him and his wife moving to Vermont from New York to settle somewhere that they could raise their family. And after leaving his New York life behind,
00:09:53
Speaker
Heath tried to figure out what the next steps in his career would be, and the opportunity, maybe the risk, presented itself when Howard Dean, his quote-unquote neighbor down the road, announced that he was running for president. And Heath knew he could follow the campaign with a camera and capture something historic. The film may never have found its way into the mainstream. History is written by the winners, right?
00:10:20
Speaker
but I found it during my 2003 research. And so I reached out to Heath to speak about his experience making the film.
00:10:28
Speaker
And he generously agreed to speak with me. So if you're interested in politics or the political process or Howard Dean or 2003, I really do recommend checking out Heath's movie, Dean and Me, which is available on his website, stomediagroup.com. And it'll also be linked in the show notes. And one last thing, there was an issue with my audio in this interview.
00:10:54
Speaker
which is so fitting, right? So all I ask is that you extend to me the compassion and the benefit of the doubt that we failed to offer Howard Dean after his audio gaffe. Thank you for being patient with me as I grow into this podcast. On that note, here's my interview with Heath Iden, Director of Dean and Me, Lessons from an American Primary.
00:11:24
Speaker
Stay tuned after the interview for our Song of the Week.
00:12:05
Speaker
I actually started the process because I knew the artist who was doing his portrait for the the state house and in Dean's fashion he had on they called the LL Dean painting in the state house because it was his governor's portrait and I called the little clip the governor's portrait.
00:12:25
Speaker
And, you know, it got a little, little press locally and all that because he's in a canoe with a paddle and he's got, you know, bean stuff on. And it's just a very unique portrait instead of the traditional ones that you see, you know, with the side view of the governor. He went out of his way to show the beauty of Vermont.
00:12:46
Speaker
I mean, to me, it's signified having the history that I had with politics in Minnesota and so forth. It was in my education, it was obvious to me that this guy was going to be running for president and outside liberal candidate and anti-war candidate. And there was plenty of room for it.
00:13:04
Speaker
And I also was like, what am I going to do in Vermont? And I always wanted to get back to the filmmaking that I had done in high school and other years. And so that was just an opportunity that was just like, you know what, he's going to be in New Hampshire all the time. I'm an hour away from New Hampshire. And it just kind of snowballed.
00:13:24
Speaker
Yeah. What was your background in politics in Minnesota? My mother had a Native American Indian Art Gallery in Minneapolis, and she always met a lot of interesting people. I used to hang out down there. And at what point she had this guy named Ted Mondale come in with his friend Ted Yates. And Ted Mondale's father, of course, was about to embark on his journey to win the Democratic nomination back when Reagan was president and
00:13:52
Speaker
And so I tagged along for that and was able to get cigar smoke filled room access to hang out and watch this process when I was, I think I was 15 when I ended up in San Francisco for the Democratic nomination and was able to see his acceptance speech and guys like Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy and all those guys. But also Walter's son Ted was just like a
00:14:19
Speaker
like a big brother to me. And so he would bring me, you know, he'd show me how it worked, like the telephone canvas calling and things like that. And he just showed me the ropes, but he just made sure I had good influences around me.
00:14:33
Speaker
What was it about Howard Dean's run that felt like it was worth pursuing as
Media's Role in Shaping Political Narratives
00:14:38
Speaker
a filmmaker? You knew that he was in the area and that he would be sort of in New Hampshire a lot and that you could easily travel and follow along the campaign, but was there anything about him personally and his views that felt really magnetic to you or that felt really inspiring? Yeah, no, I did find him inspiring. Of course, you know,
00:15:02
Speaker
Ironically, a lot of it was about logistics, but it wasn't just that, it just felt like, you know, things were falling in my lap that from my, you know, when I was younger, doing films in high school and things like that, it just was like, you know, this guy is gonna be a magnet for, he's a firebrand and he's gonna catalyze this anti-war movement. On one hand, I think people miss
00:15:31
Speaker
The point of the film, which is not so much about Howard Dean, but it's more about how the mass media is choosing our candidates for us and directing us in ways that don't give a chance for someone from the outside to be able to get a shot and actually inject that populist message in there to the point where we all kind of know we're just going to be told who we're going to get at this point.
00:15:58
Speaker
As soon as it looks like we're going to get someone like a Howard Dean who's willing to talk about issues like guns and the environment and health care and all the kitchen table issues back when there were kitchen tables, he struck me as somebody who could possibly do this. And part of my cynicism today is, of course, from my lesson of my own film, which is, yeah, they figured out a way to
00:16:25
Speaker
to pull those messages right out and keep the status quo going with the manufacturing of the so-called stream and all that. And he might not have been the best candidate. He couldn't get out of his own way when he could have pivoted in certain ways to appeal to the masses more. Governor Dain. Tonight I think we're beginning a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party as well as for the soul of America.
00:16:55
Speaker
I don't think we can win the White House if we spend all our time talking about the Patient's Bill of Rights, instead of insisting that we have health insurance for every American, as we do for every child under 18 in Vermont.
00:17:07
Speaker
I don't think we can win the White House by voting for the No Child Left Behind Bill, which should be called the No School Board Left Standing Bill, instead of funding childcare for most children, as we do in the state of Vermont. I don't think we can vote for $350 billion tax cuts, which prevent us from balancing the budget and prevent us from funding early education, as we do in the state of Vermont. And I don't think that we can vote for a new doctrine of presidential preemptive war and still keep American values.
00:17:40
Speaker
I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here once again to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Local media always chuckled about this because Howard Dean was known as more of a centralized figure. So to see him streaming about more liberal issues was a bit of an insult to some of the old-time liberals here in Vermont.
00:18:00
Speaker
You, you set out in 2003, right? Like in the, in the summer. And then you ended up following the campaign through like March, 2004. Is that timeline correct? Uh, yeah. I mean, I basically, uh, you know, as a kind of became a, uh, there's a joke that Tucker and I had about this being a dead show. It kind of became like a.
00:18:24
Speaker
You know, okay, we're going to this state, we're going to this state, we're going to this state. And there weren't many things that I missed. On our way to Dean in Boston. Howard Dean speaking at Copley Square in Boston on the 23rd, September, 2003. Storming like hell.
00:18:52
Speaker
I'm thinking I'm crazy to try to make this event. I was gathering these friends along the road. It's kind of like you look forward to seeing people that you knew were going to be out there, like certain characters that were also following candidates. And also, I just felt like I was doing something important. And, you know, it was...
00:19:22
Speaker
It was like a story that needed to be told that wasn't that was going to be defined by the media. And then, you know, of course, there were.
00:19:30
Speaker
you get your usual CNN, you know, definitive documentary on what happened. Howard had nothing to do with, you know, the important things about it, which are, of course, about grassroots politics and the fact that, you know, people can make a difference if they, if they, you know, bond together and, and, you know, stick to, stick to an issue and create change, force change, which is the only way things happen. There's no movements in America that don't happen without, you know, a pushback.
00:19:59
Speaker
And, you know, the, the ascension of the internet as well, and the ability for them to raise that much money, was a major, major factor that they tapped into, that allowed them to not get pushed out as quickly as, as one would think, you know, a small time Vermont could ever would, would have on the main stage. And so there were some, you know, pretty big historical movements in that. And, and just the, the Iraq war was 20 years now.
00:20:29
Speaker
Since March, March 2003 was when it started. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there's, you know, it just, it's obviously frustrating at the same time, amazing for me, because that was, you know, back then it was like, wow, there's going to be a lot of people killed during this. And, and to.
00:20:47
Speaker
and it was all based on lies. Yeah, there's a really interesting moment in your film when Saddam Hussein is captured, right? And the story becomes, this is really bad for Howard Dean.
Internal Criticism and Media Narratives
00:21:00
Speaker
Of all the major democratic presidential hopefuls, Howard Dean has been the most forceful in opposing the war in Iraq.
00:21:08
Speaker
And there is speculation whether Saddam Hussein's capture will hurt his candidacy. That remains to be seen. But the attacks on Mr. Dean from other Democrats are now the clearest sign that they think he is very much in a commanding lead. If Howard Dean doesn't think we're safer with this guy in a prison, I'm afraid Howard Dean has climbed into his own spider hole of denial. We live in a very dangerous world.
00:21:35
Speaker
This ad, which looks and sounds like it could have been scripted by Republicans, was actually produced by Democrats.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah. So all of a sudden you get all these so-called Democrats like Dick Gebhardt and Kerry and everybody bonding together. Do you think this is our moment where we can pass, you know, Howard Dean office as the, you know, the leftist hippie who doesn't understand the dangers of the world. And all those guys are leaders. All one by one fell by the wayside in terms of the support of this disastrous war. This is a time when we're all suddenly learning about how
00:22:15
Speaker
if you put a fear factor graph that Bush was doing, you know, like, oh, the terror level is up here, the terror level is here, and it was suddenly coinciding with other issues that, you know, they needed to take off of regular people's minds. That was a moment where people of power learned really how much fear factors into having the ability to get what you want.
00:22:43
Speaker
I want to go back to what you were saying about like the internet and that was the prominent and like the first sort of media narrative about Howard Dean was that he had captivated the attention, the grassroots attention, the populist movement through these small donations on the internet, which of course now is this like trope that we hear all the time in every campaign is the stats about how many
00:23:06
Speaker
donation smaller than $10, these candidates get online. That really was sort of started and resonated through Howard Dean. But in the documentary, you also there, it seems like there's two different websites that you were actively participating on. There was your website, so you created a blog, deentv.org.
00:23:28
Speaker
And then there was also a site called Dean nation.com, which I guess, uh, were individuals blogging about how our Dean and about the issues. And you were also a blogger for Dean nation.com. Yeah. Yeah. Um, those were the, yeah. I mean, I made my attempt to do mine, but I could never, you know, get the numbers and, uh, what I was trying to do, and I was the first to do it actually.
00:23:55
Speaker
was I was taking my video clips and I was putting them online like as if I was a network.
00:24:02
Speaker
DTV.org. Wow. That's a reality TV show on the campaign of Governor Dean. You can go to DeanTV.org. Okay. With Dean Nation. No, no cameras. What was your question? Oh, DeanTV? No, I don't want to talk to the real media. Where you from, you bastard? You know, I got to the point where I was able to put something from the road and things like that, but this is very early and
00:24:27
Speaker
in the ability to do these things. I'm still dealing with tapes and I'm, you know, I don't obviously have much of a budget. I'm driving, you know, the old family car. I'm like doing funny things to get attention, like putting, you know, making my own network. You know, most people wouldn't have a problem, but it was like, you know, if you played their game, you were able to, you know, kind of get better access without any doubt and that type of thing, which is why I was able to
00:24:56
Speaker
probably get some beginning respect out of the upper class media personalities, which became kind of snowballed as I was doing this stuff and putting things up on the internet, the more people wanted to talk to me.
00:25:15
Speaker
Had you created a website before or was this really like your first experience with making a site? No, I had to raise money. I was terrible at that stuff. I mean, I did it because I had a degree in publishing from New York university. So one of the things that I did back, I mean, I was writing papers about how this is, you know, watch out, the internet's going to be the next business card. You're going to have to have this. And back then it,
00:25:41
Speaker
people were still doubting that the internet was going to be anything. This is, you know, not there. So, so no, I had to raise money from some local wealthy people and pass that on to a person who's good at creating the website. Subsequently, there was, you know, there was a guy in the, in the Dean campaign himself who was suddenly wanted to do what I was doing. And he had, he, he had Joe Trippi on his side. So, you know, they were
00:26:06
Speaker
All of a sudden they were trying to create their own Dean TV. And then the access I had in the beginning started to go away as I wasn't needed. And they wanted to use the people's money to create their own little legacies on their own stuff. Yeah, that was something I guess I should look back and be proud on. It was a lot of work and it certainly wasn't helping my marriage.
00:26:33
Speaker
Let's let's talk about the scream. I know it's horrible. We hate it. But you weren't at the actual event that the scream where the scream occurred supposedly, but it's in your film. And in the in the moment that in the film, it's actually really hard to tell that that's the scream.
00:26:56
Speaker
What did you make? Like, did you make anything of that speech that night? And when people started coming out and talking about this cream, what were, what did you think? Like, what did you think about that whole, when that became the story, the narrative?
00:27:10
Speaker
It didn't occur to me immediately how it was going to be played, because I didn't quite know what was going on, that they had given him that microphone that shielded out anything that he was hearing around him, because it was the crazy, raucous, 5,000 kids streaming and all that. And so he went into that mode where he couldn't
00:27:37
Speaker
hear over himself. So combined with that type of microphone that it was shielding that stuff out. You know, he couldn't hear himself when he was when he was yelling and playing to the crowd, which was what he loved to do. You know something? If you had told us one year ago that we were going to come in third in Iowa, we would have given anything for that. And you know something? You know something?
00:28:05
Speaker
Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina, and Oklahoma, and Arizona, and North Dakota, and New Mexico. We're going to California, and Texas, and New York. And we're going to South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington DC to take back the White House. Yeah!
00:28:33
Speaker
But, you know, that was also a mistake of his and he wasn't media savvy to think about that stuff. I think even he was getting tired. What I did know though, was that it's traditional that you can always come back in New Hampshire from Iowa. If you were top three in Iowa, you were probably going to do okay, at least in New Hampshire.
00:28:55
Speaker
That moment was just turned into this joke and all of a sudden the atrocities of these people sending people off to die in a war that was based on a lie didn't matter because as America is, the joke was on Howard Dean.
The 'Scream' and Media Impact on Campaigns
00:29:17
Speaker
uh that he dared cheer on the youth of his campaign and say don't worry about we're gonna we're gonna keep going on we're gonna you know but as soon as they had that footage um and it hit the comedy circuit he had the air around him that he already knew this was done because it just was
00:29:33
Speaker
you have you traditionally have a couple of weeks to be able to pick things up again and get to New Hampshire and New Hampshire normally would be like oh we don't want to we don't want to deal with those folks out in the midwestern doing we got our own way of saying things here in New Hampshire they're proud and anytime before when I asked about Dean it was just nothing but love for him in the New Hampshire you know parties that I went to and things like that and
00:29:57
Speaker
And then on the streets, it was like, you know, well, that guy's unhinged. It was basically like, wow, people just take this hook line and sinker and just something like that can take, you know, all those issues and just throw them out the window because Jay Leno is saying that the guy's a goofball and here, let's play this over and over and over. I mean, at every station, it was like they all wanted him out because he challenged his status quo.
00:30:27
Speaker
Well, after my interview with Dean and his wife, I noticed that he's holding a handheld microphone, one designed to filter out background noise. So we collected some other tapes from the night of Dean's speech, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone Dean held on stage. What about the scream as we all heard it? Well, listen to how it was in the room. The so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all.
00:31:00
Speaker
Like, as this became a dead show, the more people get, you know, all the journalists and everybody, you just see them getting worn out and they're all going from the same bar as the whole thing. Like, I think back on noon and I went already that it was going to be John Kerry. And it was like, I just, at that point was too much of a rookie myself to be like, I just don't see it. There's no excitement for him out there or anything like that. And then I think that when I saw Biden, like when he was running for president, there's nobody at his things. I'm like, yeah, this is the same old thing.
00:31:31
Speaker
Well, you've talked about the dead show aspect of it. And there's like this funny recurring cast of characters in the film of people that you meet along the road. There's of course young Tucker Carlson. There's Sean Hannity, who we see a couple of times. There's this guy Darius, who's like running for city council in Lowell, Massachusetts. You know, obviously I think
00:31:56
Speaker
Tucker Carlson, it was so jarring seeing him in this movie because he seemed really genuinely kind to you. But then on another level, I'm also like, is he just trolling you? Was there actually an underlying sort of cruelty there? I don't know. But he also, he recognized he called you out at all these moments. He seems to have given you access and given you time.
00:32:24
Speaker
But you know he kept saying he was a Dean fan like there, you know, they're all these sort of funny moments that happen Hey man, are you ready? Okay, so since you're the head of Dean TV I was gonna ask you know, is he gonna
00:32:52
Speaker
can the leadership of the Democratic of the DNC. If I can fire all those guys. You know? I mean, Terry and the Clintons. Yeah. Yeah, we're real. I know. We're real. Yeah? I wonder. I mean, the point is, most of us die-hard dean people. We really have it out for the court. I know. Because we really did have a problem with the integrity of the White House. Of course, and plus they marginalized the honest left.
Interactions with Media Figures
00:33:27
Speaker
How does it feel now, like 20 years later, knowing
00:33:34
Speaker
who Tucker Carlson becomes, Sean Hannity, who these guys end up becoming, that these were people that you had relationships with. The characters came out, and Tucker and I are probably around the same age. We identified early on that we both went to a lot of dead shows, and that's why it kind of became a running joke. And it took a pivot from me being a little more
00:34:04
Speaker
front line about this thing to being like, you know what, the only way I'm going to, you know, get any traction at ever get anything is if I do something a little different here and make these people my correspondence too. But what Tucker was more like, you know, he did a good job of cozying up to me because he knew he could tell at a certain point, he could tell all this guy's not going to go away. And then he starts, you know, playing me in certain ways where like, like,
00:34:31
Speaker
Like that one time in the film where he's talking about General Clark and he starts to say, oh, your spider senses get tingling. When you think of that guy, he's probably got his own dungeon and all that. Or it's just like, it was a real education kind of being around him to learn that, wow, he can say whatever the hell he wants. And people, I know that he's joking, but other people won't. And I know so many people now have had discussions with people now who just
00:34:58
Speaker
They eat it up. It's like, and they get mad. They get unfriended on Facebook and things like that. If I say, you know, I actually know the guy and I know that he's just playing, you know, and they don't want to hear that. He's like, you know, their savior. I try not to talk about this stuff, but I kind of, because of the film locally and frankly, wherever I went for many years,
00:35:25
Speaker
I became like that high noon character where everybody just wanted to debate me about everything because I put myself out there. In order to go on with life and all that, it's like I either was supposed to make a living out of doing that stuff, but I was also not willing to pick up and move for Vermont.
00:35:49
Speaker
I'm a regular average homeowner in Stillvermont just trying to scrape by a dollar and wish I had that money that I spent on that film but at the same time it really did help just establish that okay this guy knows how to make a good film and I might not have done another feature once sense and all that but it's anything's possible right? Yeah I mean I found myself
00:36:16
Speaker
really genuinely moved by your film I mean obviously I knew what happened in 2004 but I was like rooting for Howard Dean watching your movie like I was like come on we it doesn't have to be like this it feels like it feels insane like knowing everything we know to like
00:36:35
Speaker
after the decades of war and the lives lost and like the total destabilization of an entire region and possibly the world, that he was this vocal critic and that we had this opportunity. Like we had a real candidate who was like really talking about something that now feels so resonant. But I also, the other, you know, your film is called Dean and Me and I feel like the me part of it, like your story,
00:37:00
Speaker
I was so moved by you and like your perseverance and your persistence and how you showed up and how like you sort of took on the establishment and
00:37:10
Speaker
how you just kept going and this isn't a spoiler but like at the end of your movie you go to DC in 2006 and you get a meeting with Howard Dean and it's like the eve of the night of the returns of the midterm elections in 06 which was a huge night for Democrats
00:37:32
Speaker
And Howard Dean is the head of the DNC. So he gets to take some credit for that massive win, which is really exciting and kind of a vindication for him, right? But how was that for
Interview with Dean: Closure and Influence
00:37:42
Speaker
you? Like, what was that interview like for you? How did you get that interview? How did it feel after all of the years that you put in on the campaign trail to meet him in his DC office in this in this new post that he had and also to have this sort of full circle ending for your movie?
00:37:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I've got to give Deanna real credit for that because she was a Deanna Camille who was the documentary professor at the Newstool and other places before she passed a few years ago. And just other characters that I had gone through as well that I had gotten to know on the road. And also, you know, I was given, you know, I was given 60 seconds, you know, and it was like,
00:38:28
Speaker
It was like, get in there, shake some hands, and hurry up and ask the question. But they did recognize that I worked hard, and I spent a lot of money. And it became a work of love and obsession at the same time. And to be able to get in there at that moment, I was nerve wracking on one hand, but on the other hand,
00:38:54
Speaker
it probably wouldn't have been, you know, it was just a great way to be able to end the film where it was like, okay, you start out, you're in because you're, you know, you're helping with publicity and all that. And then people start to get greedy and within the campaign and territorial, they're starting to measure their, you know, curtains up for the White House, that type of thing.
00:39:16
Speaker
and then all of a sudden things are falling apart, but there's still me there who couldn't just stop because it was like the story still had to be told. I didn't have a choice. I was in too deep and in love with the story. We needed a good ending. And for us to be able to pull that off was great. But also, of course, it was frustrating because it was like Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi
00:39:44
Speaker
And Chuck Schumer are of course taking all the credit for this stuff when it was Howard Dean's new 50 state strategy that was leading the DNC at the time to be able to get candidates that they normally wouldn't have gotten. So yeah, so in the end, I still appreciate the idea that I was able to get into that building. It was like a force to be able to get in there and get a little nod, get a handshake.
00:40:13
Speaker
and just take a small part in feeling, okay, there's a bit of a moral victory here, I guess, and political victory. It wasn't Howard Dean becoming the nominee, but at the same time, he was able to get a little bit of a satisfaction that what he was doing was correct. And in the end, he had that. Yeah.
00:40:40
Speaker
All right, I decided to come down to Washington DC. It's kind of a big night. Tonight we're having the congressional elections. At stake tonight, many seats in the Senate and many seats in the House. Tonight we're hoping to go down to the DNC and ask some questions of the chairman, Howard Dean, and see if we can watch some returns with him to see what he thinks and what he thinks is going to happen tonight.
00:41:07
Speaker
We literally have to admit it because he's got to be downstairs. I can't tell you how much we appreciate him. Hey, Karen. Yes, I am. Hi there. Hi. How are you? Yes. Good to see you. So, are we winning, by the way? Yeah, we are not winning in this particular race. We didn't expect to. Would you like being DNC chairman or presidential candidate better? Which one do you prefer? Well, this is a little easier. But, you know, Washington is an interesting place and I'm learning a lot.
00:41:39
Speaker
And, and he gets Obama too, right? Like, you see the strategies, you see my, I was, I went caucusing for Obama in 2008. And, uh, and I was reading all the blogs and I, you know, and I remember the conversation felt so like revolutionary at the time, but now I realize that the genesis of it was probably Howard Dean and the fact that he was like the national leadership at the time.
00:42:07
Speaker
They took all of his best guys and girls from the internet, from that effort. I do know for a fact from subsequent conversations and Dean reunion type stuff. And in an interview that I did with Howard that never made it in the film, where he was proud that all these, look at what's happened with these people. And even though we didn't win, we did win by changing
00:42:35
Speaker
the way politics is done and how you can get a voice like Obama's out there as a force. So yeah, a lot of those folks ended up in that campaign and others, but they were able to share the lesson of the Dean campaign.
00:42:52
Speaker
I think that your film, like I said, it's really a time capsule and it's so educational about the whole process in general, but also there's so many things in it that it's like even the scream itself, looking back on it and the ridiculous absurdity of it. And just the fact that like Tom Cruise jumping on a couch four years later, five years later after the scream ruined his career, like you see echoes of it in all of these places. And I really hope, I mean,
Understanding Media Narratives in Politics
00:43:22
Speaker
I really hope that we sort of approach the cyclical nature of everything and are able to look back on the lessons of Howard Dean, especially when the stakes feel really, really, really high now. They were high then, but they feel especially high now.
00:43:37
Speaker
that we take our candidates seriously and we don't fall victim to the narrative that the media portrays them in, which is sort of what your film was getting at too. We're gonna put a link to the film to your website in this episode so everyone can watch it. I really recommend it.
00:43:56
Speaker
Could I just say quickly, it wouldn't have been possible without Deanna Camille at the New School, who has since passed away, who is, you know, a dear friend of mine from those gallery days, and Iris Codd, who is still at SUNY Purchase, who's the editor, who's just, you know, obviously had a lot of experience that helped. You know, you got to remember at the time, though, it was like there was still this
00:44:21
Speaker
this hope that there would be some sort of payout in the end because it was like I had a contact in HBO who I thought was going to be able to help me but in the end if you don't have the winning candidate it's just very hard to gain traction that way so
00:44:37
Speaker
So I did my little film festival run with the film. I'm very proud of it. I just had to let it go at a certain point. I just needed to be proud of what I did. And I needed to have a life in Vermont. And so the film was the first thing I did. And it just kept snowballing and building as Dean went. I went for a bit of a hike before I got out here because I'm like, I got to think about this film again. I haven't thought about it a long time.
00:45:05
Speaker
I just kind of had to set it aside at one point because it became an obsession that was having more negative effects in my life than positive at a certain point. It's like you just have to realize that this is not going to go much further than what I've done with it so far.
00:45:39
Speaker
I knew there were things I was putting in that based on what Iris and I, Indiana, thought would make the best film. And I had to like,
00:45:52
Speaker
I had to concede, well, I didn't have to concede. I said straight up, I think that what's going to put this together is to make sure we put the humorous moments in there. And there's some unflattering moments, maybe in Drunk and things like that in that film that I still wonder, well, if I didn't have that in there, would it have resonated better and all that? But in the end, it wouldn't have mattered. And so it was very frustrating.
00:46:15
Speaker
I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the fact that you came out of the blue and I'm interested in it. You know, that's amazing to me. So I very much appreciate it.
00:46:26
Speaker
I think everything is about timing and we're about to hit 20 years. I mean, we are 20 years since 2003, but 20 years till the, since the 2004 primary. And you really, like when I say that I felt moved, I've, and why I so appreciate this is cause I am, I'm also like an independent person who has just, I'm just trying to do this on my own. And I saw that in you too. And I think that like.
00:46:54
Speaker
There's something there and I think there's a real lesson to be learned from all of the material that you have and from your story and from what the message they were trying to send. Thank you so much again. Much appreciation.
00:47:44
Speaker
It's weird being in 2023.
00:47:47
Speaker
looking back 20 years on year 2003, thinking about how we were thinking then about where we'd be today. Or, in one case, where we'd be in 977 years from today. Our song of the week this week is called Year 3000 by the band Busted.
00:48:09
Speaker
If you were to write a song called the year 3000, what would your vision of that time be? Because I can guarantee that you wouldn't be talking about how hot your great great great granddaughter is. That is one of the takeaways Busted took from their time travel to the year 3000 in their song. It's a pretty well known song now because it was covered
00:48:28
Speaker
and sanitized by the Jonas Brothers, who I have to say said that your great-great-great granddaughter is doing fine rather than looking fine, which is how it went in the original song. The song came out on January 13th, 2003, reached number two in the UK, and it was inspired by Back to the Future. As Busted sing, they tell us the story of their neighbor, Peter, returning from the year 3000 and reporting back that not much has changed, but they lived underwater.
00:48:59
Speaker
Peter and the band then go to the year 3000, and even though they're living underwater, it's filled with boy bands and triple-breasted women who swim around totally naked. I know this all sounds so absurd, but the song is so silly. And now when we talk about the year 3000 and living underwater, it definitely has a different meaning, a much more ominous and doomsday-ish vibe than what Busted meant when they sang those lyrics.
00:49:29
Speaker
So maybe we can take a minute together and sit in that more lighthearted vision for the future right now with our Song of the Week, year 3000, by Busted. We drove around in a time to sing like one in a fail we'll see. Yeah, yeah. He said I've been to the year 3000. Not much has changed, but it's just underwater.
00:50:08
Speaker
Thank you again to Heath Iden for having this conversation with me about Howard Dean. Just a reminder, you can look at the show notes so that you can watch his film. And I also want to thank him for letting us use clips from his movie. We really appreciate that.
00:50:27
Speaker
Our show is written, produced, and edited by me, Helen Grossman. Luke Schwartz and Evan Joseph Sawtooth composed our theme song and the original music you heard in this episode. Our show art is by Maddie Herbert of Dame Studio. If you like this show, please rate and review it and subscribe. It helps us tremendously. And if you have a Song of the Week or a 2003 memory you want to share,
00:50:55
Speaker
You can call in at 724-Class03, DM us on Instagram at classof03pod, or send us an email classof03pod at gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening. Class dismissed.