Hearing just a shout of frustration

JOSEPH N. BELL

I watched Howard Dean’s concession performance after the Iowa caucus.

Not the sound bytes repeated endlessly afterward. I’m talking about

the whole thing, beginning to end. The setting. The nature of the

audience. The emotional environment. The obvious frustration.

Dean had just been pushed into third place in a popularity contest

that he had been heavily favored to win a few days earlier. This jolt

came after two weeks of relentless acrimonious attacks on him from

every position on the political spectrum. And so in that overheated

atmosphere, he hollered and punched his fist in the air and pointed

his finger. I was briefly startled until I considered the

circumstances -- then shrugged it off.

It wasn’t until the next day that I was told by the media sound

bytes, the talk show hosts, the stand-up comedians and some fevered

editorials that Dean’s performance was a sure sign of an unstable

individual and probably disqualified him as a serious presidential

candidate. All this rhetoric clearly hurt Dean in New Hampshire last

Tuesday. He was supposed to win that one, too.

So as the primary circus moves on to South Carolina, I’d like to

tip a glass in Dean’s direction. The verdict of the voters in the

primaries still to come will, of course, finally decide who goes up

against Bush in November, but the once foregone conclusion that it

would be Dean has deteriorated considerably. How much this has to do

with his post-election performance in Iowa, I have no idea. So I

asked that question of Dr. Joseph Pursch, our friendly neighborhood

shrink, who occasionally breaks bread at our house.

“The negative reaction to Dean’s behavior after the loss in Iowa

simply demonstrates that a large segment of the public doesn’t trust

somebody whose self-control degenerates into behavior they are

capable of themselves -- that under the pressure of campaigning, he

turns out to be no better than they are,” he said.

“This isn’t a problem with young people, who find Dean appealing

because in many ways he acts like them by speaking the truth

immediately without regard to consequences,” Pursch said. “But,

generally, we are unforgiving of people seeking public office who

behave as we do or show human weakness. Dean has to dig out of this

place with humor, and he seemed to do that quite well in New

Hampshire.”

This leads me to wonder at the superficiality of the judgments we

pass on our political candidates. I’m old enough to remember Sen.

Edmund Muskie standing in a New Hampshire snowstorm and shedding a

frustrated tear over an outrageous shot at his wife in a local

right-wing newspaper. This public display of emotion probably cost

him the Democratic nomination against Richard Nixon in 1972.

I find a special sort of irony in noting that while Dean was being

pilloried in the media for his Iowa antics, the vice president of the

United States was making speeches here and abroad hanging on doggedly

to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the same

time, his own director of the search for those weapons was saying

publicly -- and emphatically -- that the overwhelming weight of

evidence indicated that no such weapons existed. Dick Cheney’s

near-fanatical state of denial got nowhere near the coverage of

Dean’s hollering -- perhaps because Cheney delivered it in soft,

well-modulated tones.

In the primaries to come, Democratic voters may not see Dean as

the strongest opponent to send out against Bush. If that’s how it

plays out, so be it. They may well be right, but I hope that decision

isn’t based on incidents that speak more to his humanity than his

qualifications for the presidency. I’d much rather support a

candidate capable of shouting his frustration to a group of youthful

supporters than one who softly and calmly denies reality.

No matter what happens now to Howard Dean’s candidacy, I feel I

owe him a debt of gratitude. He brought into the open a whole series

of issues on which the Democratic opposition had been cowed into

silence by the fear of being judged unpatriotic. It took Dean to

break through this cowardice, put Iraq on the table and then speak

out for the multitudes of Americans who opposed this war, both before

it took place and after it turned into a quagmire of violence and

chaos.

While his opponents for the nomination were moving aggressively

into the new territory Dean opened up for them, they beat him up over

several statements too honest to be politically expedient. The best

example was his comment that we are no safer after the capture of

Saddam Hussein. At best, this is a simple statement of fact, and --

at worst -- a certainly arguable position, given the evidence we see

today.

Some of his other statements are more difficult to defend --

especially his floating of an unsupported rumor that Bush was

forewarned of the 9/11 attack. Dean should be held accountable for

such assertions, but he should also be allowed the same slack given

other candidates who take far fewer risks.

Maybe all of the candidates of all the parties should have for

ready reference this statement of Dwight Eisenhower: “Here in America

we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and

rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.

As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal

subversion.”

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.