The most delightful irony about the divide between Dean supporters and the Doc's tone-deaf detractors in Washington is the perception among the latter of the candidate's "unelectability."
Now, I'm not a massive fan of Dean, and after attending his Bryant Park rally last summer, I'm can't say I hold the more evangelical of his followers in very high regard. It was a little like a couple semis carrying cargos of soap and methamphetamine had collided in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert. The press and the pols have dutifully cast `em as pie-eyed neo-hippie idealists - a Birkenstock-wearing, Ben & Jerry's-eating, Starbucks-drinking subset of the snake handlers/survivalists/Scientologists/Nader dead-ender demographic. "McGovernik, blah, blah," they say. "Experience, blah, blah. What we need is a man in uniform, etc." It's all delivered in a tut-tutting monotone reminiscent of the teacher in those old Charlie Brown holiday specials - that of the weary adult addressing a pack of unruly children. What this party needs, they growl from under furrowed brows, is some adult supervision. We've all had our fun with the politics of anger, but now it's time to get real.
And that's the funny thing. For all their tie-died youthful enthusiasm, Dean's backers are the only realistic people in the goddamn party. Here's why: Howard Dean is the only candidate who can talk to people like a real person. Oh. Sorry, Sen. Edwards. Dean is the only candidate who can talk to people like a real person who doesn't come off like he fell out of a shampoo commercial.
Gephardt, I read, is inspiring in person. That'd be just ducky if he could personally visit every household in America in the last couple weeks of October. But as Gephardt is not Santa Claus (sorry, Virginia), and has no eyebrows and comes off more wooden than Al Gore on TV, Bush'd cream him. Dittos for Kerry, except with eyebrows. Big eyebrows and a chestful of medals. Stiff as a board. These guys are shining examples of why we don't let a whole lot of senators play president. In a land that loves an alpha-executive, they're like square watermelons. Conditioned through years of immersion in the airless, lightless environs of the Senate, they've grown cautious, compromising, stiff and slow-moving - they're everything that Dean is not. In short, they're unelectable.
And then there's Clark. He has bigger medals and better eyebrows than Kerry's. Apart from the pancake makeup, he's a reasonably pretty face. He's a brilliant speaker when giving a prepared address. He's as lousy as any on TV, a medium that Al Sharpton has all to himself. His campaign is a basket case, and he's staked out fewer policy positions than Dean, whose campaign is so light on concrete proposals it would float away were it not tethered to his trademarked anti-war position.
We'll see if Clark can get his act together. For the time being, it looks to this Midwesterner-cum-Brooklynite like he's the only candidate who could pose a serious challenge to Dean in the living rooms of Middle America. The rest of these guys are all good and decent men, but they and their Washington establishment backers are so out of touch, you couldn't raise `em with a satellite phone. So let `em froth and foam. But they'd do well to acknowledge that Dean's backers are onto something.