Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Short Cuts

Attack of the Killer Rabbit

After witnessing what appeared to be a psychotic episode, on live TV Monday night, an astonished national asked, "What's up, Doc?"

TV producers, rushing to come up with other similar episodes, provided several clips of Dean on the stump, where he looked alternately like a large puppy in the last throws of a distemper seizure, or a bad actor trying out for a remake of any number of Al Pacino movies. Dean's manic performance was what McCain detractors hoped they might see from that too-tightly-wrapped candidate in the early Republican primaries in 2000. It didn't happen because McCain had his military training to keep his outward calm even when he seethed inside. Five years in a Vietnamese rat hole does amazing things for a man's self- control. That is a kind of discipline one doesn't get either in med school or the ski slopes of Aspen. Laboring in the halls of the Vermont state house isn't like having one's fingernails removed.

A more subdued Dean told the press the morning after his Arggghh Moment that he owed passion to his supporters (who incidentally, didn't do their Palm Pilot, Internet, cell phone driven work on caucus night). What he gave them instead was a temper tantrum that had to be the result of bitter, humiliating disappointment. So be it. All politicians get beat from time to time. Then they congratulate the winner, suck it up and soldier on. But, watching Dean's performance does make one ask what he was doing there in the first place. Does he have fire in his belly or is it just the acid reflux that comes from saying things he doesn't believe for so long they back up on him?

Is all that screaming anger real or, as the departed Dick Gebphart suggested, manufactured?

May we suggest something far more banal is playing out on that great and permissive stage called the Democrat race for the White House. Is it possible that what we are looking at (and no one is suggesting it isn't utterly riveting) is a bored and out of work politician with a wife who decided long ago that book clubs and other people's sniffles required more of her time than he did? Is Dean's dementia the result of a mid-life crisis gone totally out of control?

In Walter Shapiro's quite insightful and ignored new book, One-Car Caravan, he writes of a long, cold car ride in the back seat of a car with Howard Dean and a driver.

This was only the third in-depth interview with a national political reporter and before Dean had learned some of the subtleties of spin. Shapiro asks him how he decided to run for president.

Dean replies:

"The answer should be that I deeply care about it, and I thought it all out. But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it."

He then launches into his stump speech - he wants health care. He wants a balanced budget. He wants a decent foreign policy. Blah, blah, yeah yeah...then circles back to his real motive.

"I decided in August 2001 that I wasn't going to run again for governor. It then quickly came to me that I had a choice of joining boards and swearing at the New York Times every morning. Basically, I was in a position where I thought I could run for president, so I decided that I was going to."

All he needed was a web site and a theme.

Could it be that what we witnessed Monday night was a man who had made a really bad life course decision and was in the middle of a heart-stopping revelation that he was in to something way, way over his head. Rather like drowning.

Lucianne