As you'll know if you've been reading my comments here, I've been getting more comfortable with Dean over the past few weeks. Missed his Hardball appearance, not having cable right now, so I tuned in this AM to catch him with the new host Chris Wallace on Fox Sunday.
Well, Chris Wallace was a nice surprise ... asked Dean the questions we knew were coming, but without the Tony Snow swarm or the Tim Russert sneer.
But Dean disappointed me a great deal. From his first sentence, where he repeated some line about the "kitchen sink" being thrown at him enoght to made it clear that the remark was canned, through his forgetting to mention, while talking about Iraq, the fact that, as Marshall put it on the open thread, "every single one of the reasons we invaded Iraq has turned out to be a lie. And yet we're still having a debate?" to his inability to wrap up the open records discussion, to his failure to just say that the Democratic party can agree to disagree with Southern voteres on faith issues if they want to come on board for economic justice: for pretty much the whole interview, he was brutally inarticulate.
He did smile, and come off as a regular guy, and of course he's generally right on the issues, except on gun control, where his position is no doubt politically expedient.
But he needs to do some serious work on his communication skills. Now.