US News and World Reports: "He was too Good to be True" (Dean)

Nation & World 2/9/04
By Gloria Borger
He was too good to be true

Let's face it: insurgent candidates make for great stories. Guy comes out of nowhere, with absolutely nothing, no one behind him. He preaches passionately to anyone willing to listen. He's a novelty at first. Then, all of sudden, he's a movement. He gets lots of press, then lots of money. Throw in the legions of blogging and Googling Internet introverts, and he's a virtual phenom. It's boffo stuff, this story line: Maverick topples Establishment. Beats all odds. Gotta love it. Too bad it hardly ever happens.

Exhibit A: Howard Dean. All that early anger against the war in Iraq, against the "Washington Democrats," all that talk about "taking our country back," and who ends up the golden boy? John Kerry--a 19-year Senate veteran handpicked by the Washington Establishment. And to whom does Dean then turn to reactivate his stalled insurgency? None other than Al Gore's former chief of staff. A Washington insider! An Establishment eminence! Or is it emigre?

If the Deaniacs are outraged, they should look at their own hero. A successful insurgency requires a dominant mood in the party and a candidate who can express it skillfully. Dean began like gangbusters, but pretty soon he wasn't the only guy out there calling to take the country back. Establishment candidates excel at sailing with the prevailing winds, so they out-Deaned Dean. By the time folks voted in New Hampshire, Kerry sounded positively antiwar, even though he had voted for it. "Everybody on this stage . . . now embraced my message," Dean whined at last week's South Carolina debate. "The truth is, I stood up for that message when nobody else would."

snip/

Dean lost his message, too. The maverick became the dissonant candidate--endorsed by Gore, blessed by Jimmy Carter, embraced by Iowa favorite son Tom Harkin. Then he battled down and dirty with Dick Gephardt, and both lost. When he turned to the domestic issues voters care about--healthcare, jobs, the economy--others had already beaten him to the punch. Worst of all, the insurgent caricatured himself with his post-Iowa rant.

more at: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040209/opinion/9glo.htm

Mods: Please note that the columnist, not I, used the nickname for Dean supporters. Click on the link to see her column.

Edited to remove a paragraph for 4-paragraph limit.

:puke:

she makes me feel like i am drowning.

:puke:

:eyes:

Borger has the same incredibly hateful, condescending attitude towards Dean as she did towards Gore. Anything she says on the matter of Dean is basically a load of crap. Borger the Whoreger!

If you choose to rip the messenger to justify your refusal to respond to very legitimate criticism of Dean, so be it.

I'm sorry to see so many DUers borrow the lazy Freeper habit of calling everyone a whore any time a journalist says anything critical about their candidate. It's sloppy, illiberal thinking and DUers should do better than that. Probably most of us are better than that, but the vocal minority who like to indulge in name calling tend to do more than their share of the posting around here. And why not? After all, I can call three or four journalists "whore" in the time that it takes for me to post just one thoughtful response to the article you posted.

By the way, I think Borger is on to something here. But I think she's also doing a lot of the echo-chamber thing that makes up 4th estate conventional wisdom among Washington reporters. Dean was talking about domestic issues, and not just the war, all along. But Borger, like most of the media, wasn't paying attention to Dean--only to what other reporters were saying about Dean. I never thought the good doctor would have legs and so I was always surprised that he stayed king of the hill for so long. His tumble has not been pretty. But we still owe him a hell of a lot for waking up the establishment to just how much Bush and the Right are out of step with real American values. When Gloria Borger writes about that, I'll start to listen.

I suspected early on that he was peaking too early:

"Oddly enough, Dean tapped into voters' anger too early. As the unknown insurgent, he had been pounding the war in Iraq for more than a year. When Democrats finally voted, they were over it. Or at least beyond it--and into pragmatism instead."

The general population just doesn't care about the IWR vote now. They are more concerned about moving forward from there and how we are going to fix the mess, and more importantly to most Americans, domestic issues.

Good article.

he'd be in the throes of his own primary right now. And he wouldn't have blasted all things establishment in speech after MoveOn speech. And when was the last time "the party" tapped Carter? (I really don't know- but he strikes me as far away from the DLCers)

Pretty much as "Washington" as you can get. Add Senator Harkin to the mix, and...

are *the* dems who I would trust to want to do things differently- to really try to give some control back to the people.

:kick:

She and her ilk delight in tearing down the real threat of Dean to prop up Kerry for Bush's cakewalk.

When is anyone going to face what a loser Kerry is without the media? They promoted him and made him the alternative to Dean by casting Dean as "unelectible" or "unpresidential". They futhered Kerry's political framing of the choices and also ignored the other contenders. The attempt to round up Democrats under the ABB banner, exploiting their fear of Bush and promote a candidate who could barely pull a lead over Sharpton on his own--without media help, is precarious should the wind blow from the other direction.

Kerry is unlikable. Without The media bandwagon he is a loser. He better pray the day never comes that the media changes it's tune, because if I don't like him, and can't be bullied into lockstep, I can't imagine many Republicans would see him as an appealing enough alternative to smirk.

We don't want too good. We just want OK. Too Good means something will be expected of us, and god knows we don't like to do work.