Howard Dean on the Campaign Trail

— -- ABCNEWS' Marc Ambinder is on the campaign trail with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as he runs for president. For the latest report, scroll down.

A spectacular non-announcement

Nov. 7 — Leave it to Howard Dean to beat expectations by NOT getting an official endorsement.

The unnervingly unusual series of events — morning show hits to talk about, mostly, the Confederate flag, with a joyous (and unwitting) celebration in Burlington, Vermont at 2:00 p.m. ET ("We got it, it being something they would soon learn was sweeter than cherry pie"), a purple-jacketed Dean at a press conference with Andrew Stern, a giggling and winking affair on stage, a paper statement announcing a delay, the first wave of confused television reports, the settling reality that Dean had helped to align SEIU and AFSCME in the same corner — well, now you know why Joe Trippi needs all that caffeine.

The secret was closely held. High-ranking Dean aides did not find out until literally moments before Stern announced it to the world, and there were top SEIU officials who were informed only within the past 24 hours.

It was not a done deal until early this week. Dean met Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, with members of Iowa's AFSCME chapter, and his appearance essentially sealed the deal with members of that union. Around then, people close to AFSCME's president, Gerry McEntee, began to sense that Dean had turned the final corner, destined to be the favorite.

Sources said McEntee and Stern spoke many times over the past few weeks, their relationship growing warmer with each conversation. They agreed to work through many of their differences, though the plan to try and do a joint endorsement wasn't hatched until recently.

It's not totally official: AFSCME's board hasn't voted yet and Dean was coy last night: "Obviously, we hope we get their endorsement," he said as his mouth crept into a smile. "We hope. On Wednesday, we'll found out."

The Dean campaign itself was deliberately kept mostly out of the loop, according to sources. The campaign was not privy to discussions between Stern and McEntee, fearing that it could be held liable under FEC rules for coordinating endorsements with the labor groups.

Dean was frank about one reason why SEIU and AFSCME will matter.

"The service unions have enormous diversity which is something we really need in this campaign and which could really complement us perfectly," Dean said.

An AFSCME spokesperson said that while the two unions may have had their disagreements, their leaders agreed that unity among labor leaders is the best way for them to beat President Bush in next year's election.

"The phrase that comes to mind is, politics makes for strange bedfellows," said Mark Mackenzie, the president of the AFL-CIO in New Hampshire.

Dean's financial prowess, his core identification as the "anti-Bush," his opposition to the entirety of the tax cuts, and Wes Clark's decision to opt out of Iowa's caucuses also helped push AFSCME in Dean's direction, sources said.

Another reason is simple: Both SEIU and AFSCME's internal polls deemed Dean their electorate's most popular candidate.

Stern and McEntee have often clashed about the way the labor movement should engage in politics, even going so far to as to establish rival funds for campaign communications. But their unions share a common economic and political orientation, more liberal and metropolitan than the well-established, so-called hard-hat unions based in the Midwest.

Although it is tempting to see the AFSCME/SEIU union as an alliance of the major service unions against their industrial brethren, two major industrial unions, the United Auto Workers and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, have yet to endorse a candidate, and UAW workers in several states seem to have a soft spot for Dean.

Still, AFSCME and SEIU have grown in influence, while the relative strength of industrial unions has declined.

Dean meets with SEIU, endorsement likely

Nov. 6 — Governor Dean will meet today with the executive council of the SEIU, which will then convene in a private session and hold an up or down vote on endorsing him.

SEIU matters because:

--It's a huge, diverse, growing union;

--Having its full-throated endorsement would help inoculate Dean from charges that he attracts little support outside of white voters, professionals and upper-income liberals;

--SEIU President Andrew Stern commands enormous respect and influence within the Democratic Party; Dean would acquire a very visible rabbi for his efforts to convince the party elite that he's electable;

--SEIU plans to make up what it lacks in numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire by spending lots of money to mobilize thousands, and provide their chosen one with thousands of volunteer hours;

--SEIU has a lot of money to spend on its political activities;

Stern has scheduled a 3 p.m. news conference in Washington, D.C. While the union deliberates, Dean will sit tight, awaiting the call to be summoned to his side.

Campaign aides insist that it's not a done deal; that their hesitant, hopeful (but not definitive) comments reflect a genuine uncertainty about what exactly will happen and how exactly the endorsement announcement will play out.

Financing

One unknown about the vote is what proportion of Dean's supporters are morally committed to the public financing system, and whether that will trump their loyalty to the candidate. Another is whether those donors who contributed to the campaign believing it would be matched will be left feeling misdirected.

To mollify them somewhat, Dean released a menu of new proposals to the campaign finance community Tuesday night. They include encouraging television stations to provide free air time to candidates, quintupling with a public match contributions up to $100 and a stronger, more enforcement-oriented FEC.

The Course Correction

After Tuesday night's debate, a number of Dean's supporters (and not a few of his staff members) told him directly that his answers about the Confederate flag did not, to put it mildly, come off well.

The result was a rare, public, course correction.

"We reacted to [our opponents] and not to the voters out there who did feel there was something wrong with it," campaign manager Joe Trippi said in an interview. "That was part of our problem."

The campaign debated overnight whether to deliberately step on their public financing announcement and take their chances with a press corps bound to the dictum that the news of the day is the news of the day. Dean did not make the final decision to address the race issue until just before he took to the stage at Cooper Union yesterday.

When he did, in the words of one staff member, "we told him to go with his gut."

Several parties — members of Congress included — suggested language to Dean, but aides said he wrote the apology himself.

Dean began to read from a prepared text, but then he looked up, lowered his voice an octave, and began to speak slowly.

"I believe that we have one flag in this country — the flag of the United States of America … I started his discussion in a clumsy way … I regret the pain that I may have caused either to African Americans and southern white voters at the beginning of this discussion."

Dean asks supporters to decide money question

Nov. 5 — The small and obvious question for the campaign now: Does the tongue-lashing over the Confederate flag flap survive the news cycle, creep into press stories about the financing decision, and put a little pressure on the SEIU to postpone an endorsement?

The big and obvious question: Has this affected and will it dampen the enthusiasm of Dean's Internet supporters?

Go to the blog:

The initial comments on the blog on Dean's and the flag question were not especially positive.(For days there has been a big debate, in fact, among the bloggers about whether Dean should apologize for the tone, if not the substance of what he originally said).

The initial blog comments on public financing, however, were overwhelmingly positive. If the 412 who posted reactions within an hour and a half of the news breaking are any indication of what will happen, the vote will result in Dean's rejecting the match and passing the collection plate.

Here is what Dean will say today during a speech at New York City's Cooper Union:

"We have two choices. The first will be for us to decline federal matching funds. It will mean walking away from $19 million. This will place the burden of funding the campaign entirely on our supporters, but with the knowledge that this may be the only way to win this election and reform our political system."

"The second choice will be for us to accept public financing. Unfortunately despite the law's best intent, it will hinder our reform efforts while rewarding the Bush campaign's attempts to further increase the power of special interests. It will cap our spending at $45 million, giving the Bush campaign a spending advantage of $170 million, which they will use to define and distort us from March to August."

If his supporters decide to let him opt out, Dean would become the first Democratic presidential candidate ever to reject public financing for a nomination fight.

"This is the biggest decision so far for our campaign," Dean told ABC News today. "And we want to share the responsibility with 500,000" people.

The campaign expects, and hopes, that his "voters" will decide to reject the match and "create an army of small donors" as Dean put it, to defeat his primary opponents and subsidize a general election campaign against a well-funded President George W. Bush.

"The reason why we're doing this is because if we decide to forgo the financing, then [his supporters] are going to have to help raise a whole lot of money," Dean said. "If [the supporters] are not up for it, we want to know about it."

Campaign manager Joe Trippi said they would accept whatever result the vote brings.

The campaign estimates it has already collected enough money to get the full match — and believes they can raise tens of millions more through the nomination season if they're permitted to do so.