The ebbing of Howard Dean was a palpable relief to most of New York's big Democratic donors. "We are alive!" one leading fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee exulted the morning after Iowa. "I've finally got a product I can work with," was the way John Kerry fundraiser Toni Goodale put it.
Although Dean is a New York boy, he'd been giving New Yorkers a queasy bout of cognitive dissonance even before his "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" performance. It was his combination of patrician and pugilistic. We've had plenty of upper-class tribunes of the people, from FDR through John Lindsay and Bob Morgenthau, but calm assurance was always their thing, not vein-popping belligerence.
A Park Avenue-type like Dean shouting hoarsely somehow doesn't compute. It's as if an up-from-the-streets, in-your-face pol like Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch were to start talking in elaborately polite murmurs. Even Deaniacs tend to cite ironic reasons for their support.
"His very dislikablity is his only likability factor for me," writer Brad Gooch told me. "He's like Ares, the little thug, the only god the Athenians never built a temple to but he got the dirty job done -- in this case, the war of being antiwar."
Few of the top 20 Democrats who run the town's political money had been Dean supporters, but when his nomination looked inexorable they tried gamely to psych themselves into candidate-enthusiasm. (Their kids liked him.) The atmosphere at Upper East Side dinner parties was oddly reminiscent of the height of the Internet boom, when pre-bubble smarties like Donald Trump and Henry Kravis started to wonder if they were dinosaurs yet couldn't shake their unease about virtual fortunes.
But then Iowa got tighter and, at a benefit dinner last week for the International Women's Health Coalition honoring Kofi Annan, which was packed with Democratic donors, you could practically hear the exhaling. Some of it was about electability, yes, but it was also about a restoration to relevance. Dean's Internet base had taken away the money guys' power to anoint, and with it the glimpse of presidential fun-rides to come. The morning after that dinner, for instance, investor Alan Patricof and investment banker Stan Shuman, two longtime Democratic givers, would board a private plane for a jaunt to the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia with former president Bill Clinton. No such sugarplum visions were roused by the rise of Internet Dean.
Even before Iowans vented, the scent of Dean's vulnerability made it okay to trash him openly. A top shrink at the Annan dinner talked about Dean's "borderline personality." There was eager agreement that Kerry had gained in empathy in the past year. An early Kerry donor who had not shown much enthusiasm lately congratulated himself in giving the crucial advice -- about the hair problem: "Have you noticed that his poll numbers started to rise the minute he got rid of that mushroom cloud over his head?" An investment banker offered this morsel of inside information: "When they took out his prostate gland, they took out his aloof gland, too."
Women, meanwhile, felt it was now okay to dump on Mrs. Dean in the same way that until last week they had been hazing the "hopelessly indiscreet" Teresa Heinz Kerry. Political correctness had prevented loyal Democrats from saying out loud how deeply weird they found Judith Steinberg Dean's determined invisibility on the campaign trail. The story went around that when a Vogue photo platoon arrived to take pictures of the Deans at home, campaign staffers told them the house was too much of a mess to shoot there. Instead, the couple posed in front of a supporter's house. How weird was that? The vision of Steinberg Dean as the mad wife in "Jane Eyre," screaming in the attic upstairs, was dispelled too late by her smiling, sane appearance in Iowa.
For most of these people the candidates for the past six months have been salesmen, not statesmen, showing up as mendicants in their 25th-floor offices, disturbing a banker's Saturday-afternoon reverie to ask in a warm, personal voice, "Steve, is there anything more you can do for my campaign?" Last fall I had seen John Edwards twice in such postures and nobody thought much of him except he was nice. At an early showcase dinner at Richard Holbrooke's apartment, Edwards blew the after-dinner moment the money boys relish by sticking to his stump speech instead of saying what he "really thinks," which is supposed to be entirely different. But after his Iowa surge the guests at that dinner were now remarking on his forensic skill and his jury-pleasing likeness to a smiling JFK. "I hear he was just brilliant in the courtroom," was the dreamy new buzz around town.
Excuse me, where does this leave their most recent establishment flavor of the month, Wesley Clark? Nobody wants to talk about that.
Nothing is sexier to donor-groupies than momentum, and there's a locomotive roaring into New Hampshire called Kerry and Edwards.
"Clark is improving every day," former governor Mario Cuomo told me. "I was an awful candidate myself at first, because being a candidate is like dancing. You may have good feet, you may have a sense of rhythm, but if you've never danced before, you step on your partner's feet. You've got to have practice. Clark has learned the steps very fast."
Since media predictions hardly came true in Iowa, I take refuge in the electronically recorded verdicts Tuesday night at an Atlantic magazine State of the Union TV dinner for a motley cross-section of New York movers and shakers. Clark, they voted, could learn to dance fast enough to beat Bush -- but Kerry would get the nomination. Which brings us back to sunny boy Edwards, whose eloquent Two Americas speech overlooks the inconvenient fact that there are indeed two Americas, but the other half votes.
