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Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

The real value of Howard Dean

By PRESTON BRYANT
JAN. 26, 2004

There’s a German word for the way in which some are now assessing Howard Dean’s campaign. It’s schadenfreude, and it refers to the perverse delight one may take in another’s misfortune.

But in this case, it’s truly hard to not laugh a little. Okay, a lot. Especially after seeing replayed so many times what folks have begun calling Dean’s “I have a scream” speech.

You know, that’s the one he gave last week on the evening of the Iowa caucuses, which he bombed after holding for about a month what was thought to be an insurmountable lead over other Democratic presidential contenders. He took to the stage after the polls had closed – he finished a deep third – and ranted like a madman, punctuating his “speech” at its end with some sort of primal yell.

Dean apparently had a good reason to wig out that night. After all, liberal Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry had ascended from his basement standing in Iowa polls to overtake Dean and actually win the nation’s first real Democratic nominating contest. Further, John Edwards, a heady first-term senator from North Carolina, had ridden a crest of some sort to also pass Dean and finish an unexpected (and impressive) second.

All of this happened to the former Vermont governor despite his having had the biggest Democratic war chest and seemingly the most passionate disciples. Politics is a funny thing, you know.

It was Dean’s own odd sort of passion that seems to have seduced a lot of Democrats, if only for a flirtatiously short time. As soon as he launched his campaign a year or so ago, most assessed his candidacy to be only slightly more credible than that of NYC’s Rev. Al Sharpton. But he began to catch fire. People warmed up to him, even found him a bit fanciful. A courtship began.

Al Gore came out of the bushes and endorsed Dean. As did Iowa’s own liberal populist senator, Tom Harkin. And then former President Jimmy Carter gave Dean his backing, doing so just a few days before the caucuses, in an effort to prepare for a few Southern primaries that are right around the corner. (South Carolina’s and Missouri’s are Feb. 3; Virginia’s Feb. 10; Oklahoma’s Feb. 17.)

And then time came for Iowa Democrats to vote. They sobered up. Got serious. Took a hard look at the fellow they’d been playing footsy with and concluded Dean’s really not the kind of guy they’d want to take home in November to meet their parents.

They then took the arm of the one they thought to be the more traditional kind of man. All of which explains why for the past week some Iowans have been sporting buttons reading, “Dated Dean, Married Kerry.” Kind of tells it all, doesn’t it?

But let’s not think Dean’s candidacy, strange as it’s become, has been for naught. It has been of great value to the Republican Party generally and the Bush campaign in particular.

You see, Dean revved up his campaign by bashing Bush in a way the other candidates feared doing to a popular wartime president. It was his months of beating Bush about the head on the war and economy that caused grassroots Democrats to take notice of Dean, much to the dismay of Kerry, Edwards, and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, two other mainstream Democratic presidential candidates. If these four guys wanted to be equally appealing to Iowa caucus-goers, they’d have to adopt Dean’s Bushwhacking strategy as their own. And they did.

In short, they allowed the Vermont Yankee to yank the whole lot of them further to the left than they’d otherwise like to be (even though Kerry and Gephardt generally reside over yonder quite comfortably). That’s because they know most Americans these days want their president to be moderate at worst, preferably pretty darn conservative.

Whoever the Democratic presidential nominee might be, he’s bound to be too far left to be successful. Dean is on his way out and soon will be a footnote, remembered for little more than the damning impact he’s had on his party’s field of candidates. Gephardt is already gone. Lieberman has, at most, a week or two left in his campaign.

Kerry is a liberal by nature, as reflected by his rhetoric and record. Voters won’t buy him in the general election. Edwards and retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who’s also a southerner, will have to work hard to undo any damage they’ve done to themselves by yielding so weakly to Dean’s early leftward pull. They’ll find that they said things they really wish they hadn’t.

Some Democrats will remain true to the belief that Dean breathed new life into their party, not realizing that he really sucked the lifeblood out of it. At least for another four years.

So the real value of Howard Dean is that he’ll have followed the lead of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, et al, in affirming once again that the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” is the wrong place for a national Democrat to be. And along the way he’ll also have damaged, probably irreparably, whoever the ultimate Democratic presidential nominee might be.

Oh, and then there’s his entertainment value. We’ll never forget that weird Iowa speech.

Try not to laugh. That’d be so very schadenfreude of you.

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