Posted on 01/17/2004 3:11:35 PM PST by Pokey78
Is this (to use a phrase America's headline writers have become suddenly fond of) Howard's end? A month ago, Dr Howard Dean was reckoned to have the Democratic presidential nomination locked up: he was set to win the Iowa caucuses tomorrow, the New Hampshire primary a week later, and he was cocky enough to have already moved on to courting the big Southern states. Instead, the former Vermont governor is stalled in a three-way tie in Iowa, and in New Hampshire the wacky general Wesley Clark is said to be rising fast while the Dean balloon slowly deflates.
When precisely did the hot-air balloon receive the fatal prick? Was it when Al Gore decided to endorse Dean and thereby infected him with his own surefire losing streak? Was it when Dean pooh-poohed Saddam's capture and his rival Joe Lieberman said the Governor was living in his own "spider hole of denial"?
Or is the real reason for the Governor's decline that even among Democrats there is a limited market for the ferocious anti-Bush anger Howard Dean tapped into so effectively last year? With his sleeves rolled up to his armpits and veins a-popping in his forehead, Dean has been urging Democrats to "take back your country". And for a while it worked. Six months ago, looking like a raging finger-puppet with a suit stuck on, he was raking in a huge pile of money from the Hollywood crowd and huge numbers of volunteers from young college kids he had improbably fired with a passion for politics.
He was sold as this year's John McCain: the outsider with the independent streak. In 2000, McCain was like a coiled spring - that side of him the thin-skinned Dean does very well. But when you went to a McCain rally there would be tributes to veterans and the Senator would cast his appeal in the kind of language few politicians can use without embarrassment - calls to service, our country's noblest ideals, debts of honour to those who wore the uniform, etc.
Dean, who got a deferment from Vietnam because of a bad back and then spent the next few months on a prolonged ski vacation in Aspen, can't match McCain's resume and doesn't try. When you go to a Dean angerthon, it's all negative: anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-rich, anti-tax cuts. And, in the end, when you've sated your angry base, the non-deranged members of the electorate generally want something positive, or at any rate a little less snarly. There is a world of difference between Clinton saying he feels your pain and Dean saying he feels your rage.
What is mystifying to those of us who have been around Dean a while is that the Howlin' Howard of the past year bears no relation to the guy we thought we knew. From my perch in New Hampshire, I watched him across the river governing Vermont through the 1990s and, although he was certainly mean and arrogant, the chief characteristic of his political persona was its blandness.
I like to listen to WDEV Radio Vermont when I am driving - it has great shows like Music to Go to the Dump By and the Old Squire, who does epic doggerel about the North Country weather. And for 10 years the absolute worst day in the WDEV calendar was when they'd pre-empt this fine line-up to go live to the Capitol in Montpelier for Governor Dean's State of the State Address. He would mumble through his script, sticking to the text, barely making eye contact; his forearms stayed clothed. But like a Vermont cow that has picked up BSE, Howard the Harmless Holstein has jumped the gate and turned into Mad How.
It's an act, and one that the previously somnolent Governor tailored to the mood of his fellow Democrats. In recent weeks, he has been trying to move on. But when he stops being angry, as he did for a very sober foreign policy speech, he is as boring as he was for all those years on WDEV. And in his efforts to reach out to Southern white males - a demographic that cost Al Gore the presidency - he sounds either condescending or bizarrely post-modern.
Recently, the hitherto proudly secular candidate pre-announced that he would be talking a lot more about his religious faith from now on because that's what these Southern voters liked to hear. Message: it's not my bag but these Jesus-freak hayseeds lap up the God stuff.
Dean was a semi-lapsed Episcopalian, the American branch of the Anglican Communion and the church of America's establishment. But he quit his church because they objected to a bike path he was in favour of. In contrast to the other schisms afflicting the Anglicans - gay bishops in New Hampshire, gay weddings in British Columbia - this was not a gay bike path; its orientation was controversial only in the geographic sense. But it exemplifies the way that Dean, now a Congregationalist, sees religion - as social work and community projects. That's not how Southerners see their faith.
As it happens, Dean is interesting from a religious perspective. His wife, Dr Judith Steinberg, is Jewish, and their two children are said to have been raised as Jews. But they are keeping a low profile: last summer, Dean's teenage son had a moment in the limelight when he got caught breaking into a country club to steal beer, though the Governor managed to turn this into a campaign metaphor - he was heading down to Washington "to break into the country club".
Asked whether his wife would be putting in an appearance between now and November, he snapped: "I do not intend to drag her around because I think I need her as a prop on the campaign trail." An independent career woman not wanting to be a political prop is one thing, but if I were running for President I'd want more from the missus than: hey, this is some goofy thing he has needs to get out of his system and the best thing to do is stand well clear, which seems to be Dr Steinberg's line.
But the absence of the wife and kids only draws the eye to the even more gaping hole: the absence of the man. Few presidential candidates have so disdained running on biography: John Kerry runs as a Vietnam veteran, John Edwards as a boy who grew up in hardscrabble poverty. But Dean says nary a word about his background except to bring up, as evidence of his unique insight into race, his request at Yale to be given a black room-mate.
Dean is not a native Vermonter or a native scrappy little guy. He's a Park Avenue blueblood raised in private boarding schools who came to the Green Mountains as part of the vast tide of hippy-dippy incomers of the 1960s and '70s. He and Dr Steinberg finished their medical training in Burlington, and almost immediately he threw himself into state politics.
In Vermont, they debate whether his arrogance is due more to being an upper-class Wasp or a doctor, though his mom says that, unlike the Bushes, they were always very thoughtful about the little people - "we didn't even treat the servants like servants". In interviews, Dean talks more about Bush's family - offering snide ad hoc psychoanalytical observations about Dubya and his father - than his own.
Still, you can duck reality for a while. If Dean squeaks a win in Iowa tomorrow, he'll be "perceived" as having done less well than expected. If he loses Iowa and then narrowly wins New Hampshire, he'll be the comeback kid. That seems entirely possible. Unlike Iowans and the rest of the country, Granite State Democrats know Howard Dean well, and they're voting for the dull, centrist Vermont Governor they have known for a decade, not the crazy guy who has been on the loose the last year.
I have to say I see no evidence in my part of the state of a Wesley Clark surge, though that might be because it's been 50 below for the past two weeks and no one wants to get frostbite taking the Dean sign down from their yard and putting up one for Clark. I'd still bet on Dean in New Hampshire, though it will be narrower than it would have been, and it will present Mad How with awkward problems as he moves on to South Carolina. What a difference a month makes for the supposedly inevitable candidate.
Another Telegraph screw up by their editor.
Howard's new nickname?
Shock and surprise!!!
I wonder if he will bring a big Bible on the campaign trail with Bible and KJV in bold letters on the front cover.
Looks like it's Kerry (or Gephardt?) vs Dubya maybe ...
Dean is playing with fire alright.
Looks like I won't get to be posting this pic too much longer ...
Dean Narrowing Separation of Church and Stump;
Invokes Muslim Phrases; Claims Biblical Knowledge
Dean's problem in a nutshell. Steyn nails it as usual.
Priceless.
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