Since I find it quite amazing that the buzz on dKos appears to mostly agree that last night's media blitz attempts to salvage Howard Dean's collapsing candidacy were effective, I have been trying to think of how to articulate my impression of that. I do not know if there is much utility in my posting a dissenting view except arguably that it gives people something to think about. It may not be worth thinking about much if at all, but I have too much time on my hands anyway!
The Debate: First of all, Howard Dean needed to do more than just not fall flat on his face during the New Hampshire debate. As many people here stated beforehand, he needed a "Hail Mary" or a "homerun" or whatever. This is crunch time. Dean does not have the luxury of time to meander back toward viability and credibility. As far as I can tell, the critical wound that must be healed entails the perception of Dean as unpresidential and by extension unelectable.
To begin with, the debate was excrutiatingly boring. A Dud of a Debate as David Corn described it in The Nation.
...it was long and dull and marked by uninspiring performances...
**
It was as if all the candidates were aiming for the same bar: okayness.
That is fine if you are the front runner (which is John Kerry) or merely trying to meet expectations (Clark and Edwards). This is not fine if you are in free fall and desperately need to stanch the bleeding. You should know you have a serious problem if your singular priority during a debate is to prove that you are mentally stable..
Even so, Dean did not even deliver in my view besides questions regarding his temperament. He frequently sounded awkward and unsure of himself. His recycled stump speech phrases sound forced and contrived. Crucially, Dean had nothing to offer. There was nothing to set Dean apart from the others. Nothing to make him look more electable. Certainly nothing to make him appear more presidential. More fiery. More capable. More anything.
Nothing.
That is what I think has been most overlooked in analyses of yesterday. Dean needs to do more than make people not think he is a loon. At this point, Dean is back to square one: He needs to convince people that they should vote for him rather than John Kerry or Wesley Clark or John Edwards. The frontrunner can run out the clock. The also-ran cannot.
Josh Marshall puts it well in his Talking Points Memo
In part I was surprised that Dean didn't do anything more than he did or try in any way to shake things up. But I think that's the
difficulty of his position. In the last week Dean has essentially switched places with Kerry in the polls. And he seems still to be falling.
He desperately needs to shake up the dynamic of the race in time to recover some ground before Tuesday. And yet his people have decided he needs to be on his best behavior to arrest his downward slide in the minds of the state's voters. So it's virtually impossible for him to do anything to shake things up. As I said before, I think he's painted himself into a corner.
Another point worth making is that the only candidate who sounded any negative notes during the debate was Howard Dean - attacking his opponents on the Iraq War. Recent New Hampshire polls have indicated that only about 10% of New Hampshire voters consider the war their #1 issue. On Friday, this gave the Associated Press its headline, expanded to include Dean's perplexing attack on Alan Greenspan:
Dean Derides Washington Politicians
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on Friday derided Washington politicians who "say anything just to get elected," a slap at his Beltway-based rivals. He expanded his target to Alan Greenspan, saying the Federal Reserve chairman "has become too political" and should be replaced.
The onetime front-runner, seeking to rally his sagging campaign by casting himself as a Washington outsider, criticized Greenspan as he assailed President Bush's tax cut, arguing that they were geared to benefit the wealthy.
"I think Alan Greenspan has become too political," Dean said. "If he lacks the political courage to criticize the deficit, if he was foolish enough -- and he's not a foolish man -- to support the outrageous tax cut that George Bush put through then he has become too political and we need a new chairman of the Federal Reserve."
I fail to understand how this does anything to assuage the image of Dean as reckless in his policy views and nasty in his personal attacks. I am of course digressing slightly from the debate itself, but this to me seems (combined with his fumble on needing UN "permission" to defend the United States) to emphasize Dean's unfitness for the presidency. Most people have approved of Alan Greenspan for a very long time. He is a very popular Federal Reserve Chairman and he is widely associated more with the Clinton era than he is with the Bush administration.
What is Dean thinking?
Prime Time Live: That some would think Howard Dean did OK in his Prime Time interview with Diane Sawyer is understandable. The Deans came across to me as sincere, unassuming, humble folks. With the emphasis on the humble. Does America want a humble presidency? While I can see how people would be drawn to the Deans in a neighborly sort of way, I again failed to see how Dean did anything to assuage the perception of himself as unfit for the presidency.
I think Timothy Noah writing for Slate put it best in Dean, Lobotomized
Seeing Dean beg for mercy over what was merely an untelegenic display of enthusiasm called to mind the last scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when Chief Bromden finds McMurphy, and he's been lobotomized, all rebellion and mischief sucked out of him, and you don't know whether to rage or weep. If only Dean had taken a swing at Nurse Ratched before they wheeled him into the operating room.
Let me just be brutally frank about my thoughts on the interview. The interview seemed weird. The Deans seem weird (in an eccentric aunt in the attic sort of way). The halting, forced "I hope I don't f*ck this up" delivery seemed weird. The way Judy Dean clearly did not want to be there and the way they talk about the presidency as just another career move seems weird. The meekness peppered with out-of-place but obviously suppressed fire seemed weird, and out of character for Howard.
As The New Republic put it beforehand: "The operative question right now remains: Is Dean weird?" What about this interview made Dean seem any less weird? More importantly, what about this interview assuaged any concerns about his electability or his mental fitness? Granted, the question can be bandied about whether there was anything that would have done so after Monday (I would say no) but that is different from saying that this did so. I cannot see how.
Furthermore, I think that this interview actually was more damaging for Howard Dean's campaign than it was helpful. I think this was for two reasons.
One, the contrast between Judy Dean and either Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton (both shown in clips) could not have been more stark. Stated clearly, Judy Dean does not look or sound like any kind of First Lady. Maybe that is not the PC thing to say, but that is just how it is in this world. Can anyone seriously see her as First Lady? I mean, really?
Two, the contrast between subdued, timid Dean and the campaign firebrand Dean could not have been more stark. Diane Sawyer played the 'concession' victory speech several times just to drive the point home. The problem with unstable people is that they are by definition unpredictable. The fact that they behave one way today is no guarantee that they will behave that way tomorrow or the next day or whenever. That is the corner Dean painted himself into. How do you prove you are not unstable if unstable people by definition are unpredictable?
In part for the same reasons as the debate, I would say that Dean struck out with the interview simply because he needed a Home Run and managed at best a Walk. But beyond that, I think that much as with the debate Dean damaged his cause in very subtle but nonetheless profound ways. All of them revolve around the image of unfitness for the presidency, which brings me to..
Letterman Top Ten Countdown: If the post Iowa "YEEEEaaaaarrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhh!" speech was a caricature of the angry, unstable outsider, his appearance on Dave Letterman was a caricature of the national joke that Dean has now become. First of all, the context of the Top Ten cameo was entirely unhelpful. Letterman opened the show by ridiculing the speech just as he's done the past couple nights. Dean's appearance just seemed to put an exclamation point on the mockery.
Does America want to elect a national joke as president?
The prevailing zeitgeist on Dean is already emerging loud and clear: Dissecting Howard Dean's implosion and A Crisis of Faith and Speech Lessons are opening volleys from across the spectrum (MSNBC, The Weekly Standard, and The American Prospect). The operative words are "faltering" "sidetracked" "unusual" "broke down" "unassuming" "icy" "failure" "trouble" "self-satisfied" "grudging" "churlish" "defiant" "crazy" and so on.
How is a parody of the joke he is becoming helpful? When Bill Clinton went on The Arsenio Hall Show to revive his own setback in the polls he came across cool and jazzy playing the sax and then entertaining and appealing in his bantering. What was appealing or cool or inviting about Howard Dean last night on Letterman? I think the appearance was an error. It did not accomplish anything to reverse his slide and if anything cemented his role in the joke at his expense. If it were up to me, I would not have agreed to that unless it included a regular sit-down chat with Dave Letterman.
By the way, I have never understood what anyone finds humorous or entertaining about the Letterman show, but that's beside the point. The only point worth taking away from Dean's top ten countdown was the lead in the Associated Press.
Dean Turns a Softer, Funnier Side to TV
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- The butt of late-night jokes and Internet-shared parodies of his rant during a campaign rally, Howard Dean turned to television to show a softer side to viewers and join in all the laughter at his expense.
Howard Dean was a butt of late-night jokes and Internet-shared parodies before Letterman and he remains the butt of late-night joke and Internet parodies after Letterman. The only thing I can find to say in Dean's favor (besides the sympathetic, albeit weirdness, of his Sawyer interview) is that the more that they show the clip of his rant divorced from the context and the moment of Monday night, the less he looks unhinged. But, the more he becomes a stale joke.
So I obviously did not find much of anything redeeming about the Howard Dean triple-play spin effort of last night. Sorry for the very long post and thanks for reading if you did.
I expect Dean to take third in New Hampshire because I seriously doubt he will pick up any significant votes from undecideds and independents that do not already support him. I do not think last night's media did much of anything to cast Dean in a more favorable light, and I think it might have actually hurt his position. The obituaries and post-mortems will fly fast and furious come Wednesday in my view. This is crunch-time. Dean needed to shift the dynamic in these last five days because otherwise after Tuesday night he becomes Dead Pol Walking.
In my assessment, Howard Dean failed.