The Dean Scream: An Oral History
BY JACK HOLMES
JAN 29, 2016
On Monday, Iowans will flock to their local churches and school gyms to participate in the Iowa Caucus. By day's end, both Democrats and Republicans will have a winner, and a bona fide frontrunner for their party's presidential nomination. Some candidates' chances will essentially be cooked. But it's safe to say that the day will not end as remarkablyor catastrophicallyfor any of them as it did for Howard Dean twelve years ago.
By January of 2004, the American left's revolt against President George W. Bush was in full effect. Simmering resentment from the contentious election of 2000 was brought to a boil by seething outrage over the War in Iraq. Left-leaning voters and grassroots activists were in search of a standard-bearer. They found one in Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, who steered the Democratic fieldand the nationtoward opposition to the war, all the while rocketing up the polls.
But then came the Iowa Caucus. The frontrunner for so many months, Dean came in third place behind John Kerry and John Edwards, shocking his supporters. But the damage was far from finished: In his concession speech in a Des Moines hotel ballroom that night, Dean tried to make himself heard above a raucous crowd of thousands. In a speech that was largely ad-libbed, he began shouting a list of states the campaign would go on to conquer in the months to come. And then he came to that immortal, cartoonish crescendo: "YAHHHHHH!!!"
The Dean Scream, as it became known, spread almost instantly across the media landscape. It played on loop on cable networks and local stations alike. Leno, Letterman, and Conan all had their fun with it, and Dave Chappelle wrote a skit that immortalized the moment for any young adults who had still somehow missed it. Dean's cry became the stuff of legend. It was the Internet's first-ever political meme, remembered as the moment We, The People decided that Dean was unfit for the Oval Office.
But if you listen to the people who were actually therecampaign staffers, reporters covering the campaign, Dean himselfthey'll tell you a different story. We did. And along the way we began to question whether the Scream was really what sunk Dean's campaign; whether he was even its biggest casualty; and most of all, whether the Dean Scream was all that it seemed.
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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a41615/the-dean-scream-oral-history/
valerief
(53,235 posts)However, a good friend found it "wrong." I was disappointed she was influenced so much by the media. She wasn't the only, of course.
Today Dean has disappointed us anyway by becoming a lobbyist for pharma.