When I realized the extent to which people were freaking out over Dean's Iowa speech, I thought: "Hunh, I've been comparing Dean to Bob Dole for months now... looks like instead of Dole '76" (when, during the VP debate, he referred to 'Democrat wars') "he's Dole '88" (when Tom Brokaw asked him if he had anything to say to George Bush and he snapped, "Yeah — stop lying about my record." That one I saw live.) Doomed in the primaries instead of the general election. Those gaffes have a way of biting presidential candidates. Various articles I read brought up previous incidents like Al Gore sighing in the first debate in '00 and Ed Muskie crying in '72. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. Is this really the way we pick our leaders? And if so, man, how shallow are we?

Ed Muskie was a senator from Maine, Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968. In 1972 a disgusting little worm named William Loeb, whose Manchester Union Leader was known for front-page editorials with headlines like "Kissinger the Kike," wrote a vicious article attacking his wife, Jane. Muskie stood on a flatbed trailer outside the Union Leader offices, and as the snow came down, he said of Loeb, "By attacking me, by attacking my wife, he has proved himself to be a gutless coward. It's fortunate for him he's not on this platform beside me. A good woman—" And then he choked up a bit.

Here's one of the few decent guys in politics, whose wife has just been smeared by a scumbag who'd previously gone after the governor of New Hampshire's 15-year-old daughter, and his voice catches as he defends her. And how does this go down in history? "Muskie cried! What a sissy! He's finished!"

George Bush's campaign in 1988, orchestrated by Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, was one of the most loathsome in modern American history — most elections are at least marginally about the issues of the day, but Bush, Ailes and Atwater made '88 about Willie Horton, Boston Harbor and the Pledge of Allegiance. But before they could get to Dukakis, they had to get past Dole, which they did by cutting a last-minute deal to get the infamous "Senator Straddle" ad, with all its distortions, on New Hampshire television. Everyone remembers Dole snarling that he wanted Bush to stop lying about his record: the line effectively ended his candidacy. People seem not to care that the reason he was in such a bad mood was that he'd just lost the primary in large part because Bush had been lying about Dole's record.

Al Gore, facing another Bush, got a lot of flak in the press for sighing during the first debate between the two candidates. But when did he sigh? When Bush dismissed Gore's attacks on his tax plans (arguing that Bush might, say, create a deficit) by saying, "Let me just say that obviously tonight we're going to hear some phony numbers about what I think and what we ought to do." Gore replied, "The governor used the phrase 'phony numbers,' but if you look at the plan and add the numbers up, these numbers are correct." Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math."

I mean, seriously, look at what was happening. Bush had no response to Gore's critique beyond "Huh-huh, huh-huh, the nerd can do math, let's get 'im" and a repeat of the old lie that Gore had once claimed to have invented the Internet. OF COURSE GORE SIGHED! Wouldn't you? Rereading the transcript, I'm quite impressed that Gore was able to keep himself from throttling the sniggering, anti-intellectual little clown. But the headline out of the debate wasn't that Bush was a sniggering, anti-intellectual little clown. It was "Gore's condescending." Apparently our nation of Beavises identified with the "Huh-huh, 'numbers,'" side of the debate, and that really makes me kind of sick.

Now it's '04, and the media has read Dean's candidacy its last rites. I'm no Dean fan; pleased as I was to see an anti-Bush movement coalesce last year, I was always a bit put off by the man at the center of the movement and puzzled at how he pulled it off. I can see a semi-Messianic leftist following forming around a Governor Moonbeam type like Jerry Brown, but Howard Dean? Centrist, NRA-approved Howard Dean as a progressive magnet? Not for me, anyway.

But even I've been a bit appalled at the frenzy over Dean's concession speech. Dean is through, they say, and he's gone on Letterman to apologize for his "crazy, red-faced rant"... that is, in an attempt to salvage his candidacy, he's playing along with a lazy, blatantly false spin. A lot of the endless TV replay of the speech has been fueled by Leno and Letterman, neither of whom has ever offered much more political insight than eight years of bad "Clinton is fat" jokes. Does Dean have an anger problem? Sure, maybe. But in this speech, he's not angry! He's shouting to be heard above a raucous crowd. His yelp at the end, which has been characterized in some articles as something akin to "YEEEEEAAARRRGGGHHHHH!", is clearly just a "Yeah!", except his voice has cracked from all the shouting. Big deal.

I watched the New Hampshire debate on (ugh) Fox News — and while I caught only about ten seconds of the regular news coverage before the debate started, it was enough to see an anchor scream "COME ON!" after reading a story... and then, after this over-the-top editorializing, he said "fair and balanced" with a straight face... but I digress. Anyway, Jen and I have both been quite impressed by John Edwards, and I liked the way he handled a question asking, basically, "What the hell do you know about Islam?" He initially rattled off the names of Muslim leaders he'd spoken with — but then stopped, said flat-out that he couldn't stand there and claim to be an expert on the religion, and then took a pretty interesting line of argument, pointing out that American leaders tended to do what he'd just done and think that because they were on good terms with the Saudi royal family or Pervez Musharraf, they were on good terms with the people of those countries. Nothing could be further from the truth, he pointed out, and what we really needed to do was engage ordinary Saudis and Pakistanis, starting by supporting better educational systems in those countries instead of abandoning the children to religious schools that would teach them blind hate.

Holy crow, this guy has the Clinton stuff down, I thought. In the second presidential debate of 1992, a woman had asked the candidates how the recession had affected them personally. Bush said, "Well, I think the national debt affects everybody." The woman said, "You personally." Bush replied, "Obviously it has a lot to do with interest rates—" The moderator cut in, "She's saying, 'you personally.'" Bush stammered and asked the woman who'd asked the question to clarify. She said, "Well, I've had friends that have been laid off from jobs. I know people who cannot afford to pay the mortgage on their homes, their car payment. [...] But how has it affected you and if you have no experience in it, how can you help us, if you don't know what we're feeling?"

Bush said, "I don't think it's fair to say, 'You haven't had cancer. Therefore, you don't know what's it like.' I don't think it's fair to say, you know, whatever it is, that if you haven't been hit by it personally." He rambled about "teenage pregnancies" and "stimulating the export." Then it was Clinton's turn. Clinton took a few steps toward the woman and said, softly, "Tell me how it's affected you again."

The woman looked at him like, "Buh?" Clinton continued, as if he and she were the only people in the room, "You know people who've lost their jobs and lost their homes?"

Watching this in 1992, my heart began to beat a little faster. I realized that for the first time since I'd been aware of the existence of political parties, we were about to have a president who wasn't a Republican.

Edwards has a lot of Clinton's feel for the right tack to take in this situations. Plus, he's a better speaker: Clinton was notoriously long-winded, but Edwards has a gift for putting ideas directly into the listener's head without having to decipher a lot of political honk-honk-honk. (Kerry, by contrast, often might as well answer questions, "Words, words, words; words words. Also, words." He did brilliantly answer a question about veterans, though. If he can manage to cast himself and the troops in Iraq as a "we" in the general campaign, he might get somewhere.) After Edwards was finished, I put the tape on pause and went downstairs to relay the exchange to Jennifer. She replied, isn't it kind of sad that you're thinking "Edwards might strategically appear insightful in a future exchange with Bush"? Edwards is insightful. Isn't it sad that you've been trained to be less concerned about that than about tactics and Defining Moments and stuff?

Yeah. It is.

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