Campaign's collapse turns Deaniacs' dreams into dust.

MANY years flora now, warming by the tire with my hound at my feet, as wreathes of pipe smoke circle lazily about me like vanished dreams, I will think now and then of Howard Dean's miserable, pathetic campaign for the presidency, and then I will think of Monica Malone.

Malone is a young "public interest lawyer" from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. I met her in Columbia, S.C., a few weeks before Democrats held their primary there. She has two kids and a lifelong interest in "issues of social justice."

Last spring a friend took her to a Dean "Meet-up," and she was hooked. She began hosting Meet-ups herself. Before long she had offered to work full-time in the campaign. "They said there wasn't much going on in Maryland for Howard," she said. "But they said, 'How about South Carolina?'"

Malone up-ended her life for "Howard": placed her kids with relatives, interrupted her law practice, and temporarily moved to Columbia as a campaign liaison.

"Of course it's a huge change for me personally, but I really feel this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the country," she said. "Howard is the only chance we have for real change."

I haven't spoken to Malone lately, so I don't know how she reacted to Dean's poor showing in South Carolina - and in Delaware, Tennessee, New Mexico, Michigan and everywhere else Democrats have gathered to vote. And I don't know how she reacted when Howard Dean folded it up for good.

There are thousands of Monicas, of course, some older, many younger, all of them now famous, as a group, for being "Deaniacs." Not since the Rev. Sun Myung Moon heard his first intimacies from the Other World has a public figure inspired such devotion among the nation's idealists and naifs.

Dean drew them in, in part, by promising a "new kind of campaign" against the forces of "politics-as-usual"--exemplified by Richard Gephardt and John Kerry. The Deaniacs responded by donating more than $41 million in 2003, much of it over the Internet.

Money and ads

In retrospect, however, it turns out that Dean's campaign was preoccupied with the same things campaigns are always preoccupied with: raising money and airing TV ads.

According to data compiled by the Campaign Finance Analysis Project and published in the Los Angeles Times, Dean's biggest expense last year, at $7.8 million, was (you guessed it) raising money by the traditional means of direct-mail solicitation and hosting fundraisers. The next biggest expense, at $7.4 million, was for radio and TV advertisements.

Indeed, the longer Dean's campaign lasted, the more conventional it seemed. Looking toward Southern states, he discovered within himself a hitherto-unpublicized religious streak. Having declined, refreshingly, to use his wife as a campaign "prop," he suddenly brought her out, prop-like.

From the stump he bragged about the endorsements he had received from such establishmentarians as Al Gore and Bill Bradley (so much for the evil of "Washington politicians"). When he faltered, Dean jettisoned his hipster campaign manager in favor of a Beltway careerist and telecommunications lobbyist, Roy Neel.

When a politician dwells on his endorsements and his fundraising abilities, he hopes to distract attention from his weaknesses. One of Dean's weaknesses was particularly telling, though largely unnoticed: a near-total lack of specific policy positions.

While the campaigns of his serious rivals amassed mountains of policy papers on everything from the Kyoto treaty to immigration policy, Dean contented himself for the most part with airy abstractions and fiery denunciations.

On tax policy, for instance, he had little to offer beyond a blanket repeal of the Bush tax cuts. Earlier this year, under pressure, he announced be would finally sketch out his own tax plan, including some cuts, as the campaign progressed, "before the convention."

Now, tragically, we are unlikely ever to see the definitive Dean tax plan. It tunas out a conventional campaign that disguises itself as revolutionary can survive, even flourish, so long as no one enters a voting booth. Then the trouble begins.

And that's when the dreams of Monica Malone and her fellow Deaniacs turned to dust--and when the vessel of their Utopian hopes was exposed as just another grasping pol.

There were hints of it all along. In the book "One Car Caravan," published last year, the journalist Walter Shapiro reported asking Dean, in an unguarded moment one night in 2002, why he wanted to be president.

"The answer should be that I deeply care about it," Dean replied. "But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it. I know that doesn't make any sense. It sounds like I'm just a very ambitious person who wants to be president."

As a matter of fact, it does. And if he'd just admitted it upfront, he could have saved Monica and her friends a lot of grief.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.