Edition: U.S. / Global

The Dean Connection

By Samantha M. Shapiro
Published: December 7, 2003

Last February, Clay Johnson, 26, took a trip from Atlanta to the Dominican Republic to visit his girlfriend, Merrill, who was studying linguistics at a university there. He carried an engagement ring in his pocket, but when he arrived, he said, Merrill was cold and distant, and he never gave it to her. Before he left, Merrill told him that she didn't love him anymore.

He returned to his apartment in Atlanta, where he worked as a freelance technology consultant. His place was also serving as a storage space for Merrill's possessions, in boxes, and as a temporary home for her two cats. He was allergic to the cats. He stripped to his underwear, lay on the floor in a fetal position and remained there for days, occasionally sipping from an old carton of orange juice. ''I was completely obliterated,'' he says. ''I didn't know something like that could actually cause physical pain.''

Johnson's friends kept calling, trying to think of something that would get him out of the house. Finally they hit on one: Howard Dean.

Johnson had been talking about Howard Dean for about a year. He had never voted, but after his mother developed cancer and could no longer afford her health insurance, he became interested in politics. When he looked at the various Democrats running for president, he felt drawn to Dean right away. He liked the health care plan that Dean had instituted in Vermont and his forthright style, and later appreciated Dean's clear opposition to the war in Iraq.

At his friends' urging, Johnson attended a Dean gathering last spring. Sixty people showed up, more than could fit in the coffee shop that Meetup.com had selected for them. So they gathered in the parking lot instead. Everyone took a turn saying why he or she liked Howard Dean. Someone handed out Dean stickers, and then people broke up into twos and threes to chat. Johnson spent most of the meeting talking with a young Duke graduate named Julie Reeve, who, he says, was ''really smart.'' She was also, he says, ''the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.''

Johnson didn't think he had much of a chance with Julie Reeve, but at least he had a reason to get up off the floor. He threw himself into the Dean campaign. He began knocking on doors, reading books on precinct districting and setting up databases. He saw Reeve at campaign events, and even went out with her a couple of times apart from their campaign activities, but he couldn't tell if she liked him.

In May, the Dean campaign posted a notice on its Web site saying that it needed a programmer familiar with social-network software to work in the headquarters in Burlington, Vt. Johnson quit his job, put the money from Merrill's engagement ring toward a Volkswagen Passat and headed out to Burlington.

Johnson's story is actually one of the more conventional at the Dean headquarters; he arrived with a paying job that he had secured in advance. Alex Perkins, a 32-year-old policy coordinator for the campaign, quit his job, sold his house in Seattle and showed up at the campaign office offering to work free. Austin Burke, 22, who researches the other candidates, drove from Phoenix -- it took him six days -- and then just wandered around Burlington asking where the Dean office was. Matthew Bethell, 20, a British university student, left London and took the year off to volunteer full time in New Hampshire, even though he can't vote in American elections.

Long before Howard Dean was considered a plausible candidate for president, he seemed to emit some sort of secret call that made people, many of them previously apolitical, drop everything and devote themselves to his campaign. Even after the campaign's 45 official intern positions were filled, people kept showing up -- mostly young people, but also senior citizens in R.V.'s and middle managers from Microsoft.

At the headquarters of most political campaigns, there's a familiar organizational structure: a group of junior employees carrying out a plan devised by a bunch of senior advisers. The Dean headquarters feels different: a thin veneer of Official Adults barely hovers above a 24-hour hive of intense, mostly youthful devotion. When the adults leave, usually around 10 p.m., the aisles between cubicles are still cluttered with scooters and dogs; when they return in the morning, balancing just-microwaved cinnamon buns and coffee, they climb over pale legs poking out from beneath their desks and shoo sleeping volunteers off their office couches.

For each person who decided to arrive unannounced at the Dean office, dozens more stayed home and appointed themselves director of one unofficial Dean organization or another. There are now 900 unofficial Dean groups. Some of the activities undertaken on behalf of Dean qualify as recognizable politics: people hand out fliers at farmer's markets or attend local Democratic Party meetings. Others take steps of their own invention: they cover their pajamas with stickers that say ''Howard Dean Has a Posse'' and wear them to an art opening, or they organize a squadron to do ''Yoga for Dean.'' They compose original songs in honor of Dean. (About two dozen people have done that; another man wrote a set of 23 limericks.) They marry each other wearing Dean paraphernalia. Overweight supporters create Web pages documenting, in daily dispatches, their efforts to lose 100 pounds in time for Dean's election. One woman, Kelly Jacobs of Hernando, Miss., took it upon herself to travel around the Memphis area for 15 weeks, standing on a single street corner for a week at a time, to promote Dean. I saw a middle-aged man at a garden party in New Hampshire preface a question to Dean by saying he was associated with Howards for Howard. Dean nodded, as if the man had said he was with the AARP.