Campaign as Therapy?
Great post by a Dean fan on why the
campaign failed. I highly recommend reading it all, but I was struck by this:
"These passages, I want to emphasize, are from a piece that presents Dean as an all but certain winner, and yet the description now sends another message entirely: Less about Howard Dean than about James Moore, less like a political meeting than a support group, not so much about pushing Dean as they are about engaging people in conversation…"
This was definitely the part of the Dean phenomenon that impressed itself upon me. So many of the stories seemed to focus on the volunteers and not on the candidate. And when you focused on the volunteers, the message you got was that they all had the big L in the middle of their foreheads. The stories (and I'm willing to admit that they may have been unfair or unrepresentative) seemed inevitably to be of those who were either drifting through life or found themselves cast adrift. The sad part is that they are about to be cast adrift again.
