How "Angry" Is Dr. Dean? (Pt. 1 of 2)

I understand the need for political reporters to develop some kind of common understanding of a political candidate's style. I really do. Everybody has their own style, every candidate has some distinctive quirks in dealing with the press.

I even understand that when the Republicans use as one of the main campaign themes that any criticism of Bush the Magnificent is based upon angry and irrational hatred, and point to one candidate like Dean as a particular example of that in practice, that the press should examine how much substance there is to it. In the quaint old notion that some of us still nurse fondly, that the press has an important role to play in a democracy and that they should take that responsibility seriously, that makes sense.

But for reporters and political analysts to just leave their brains setting on a park bench somewhere while they do it is a whole different thing. I was pretty amazed to see this particular page 1 article on the "angry" Dr. Dean this morning: "Iowa yell" stirring doubts about Dean San Francisco Chronicle 01/21/04.

Now, that's an eye-catching headline, with a catchy sub-head of "Battle cry to troops strikes some as over the top." I thought maybe with his earlier talk of appealing to the guys with Confederate flag decals on their pickups that maybe he had revived some form of the "rebel yell" of Civil War days. And the subtitle made me think that maybe he must have said something really drastic like, I don't know, outing an undercover CIA agent or something.

Reading the article, you can quickly see it must have been something really bad. Because the expressions of deep concerns take up the first six paragraphs of the article. Only when you get to the continuation of the story buried in the back of the section do you get to a quotation of what he actually said. A Joe Lieberman partisan in paragraph four was apparently concerned that Dr. Dean had contracted Kreuzfeld-Jakob Syndrome (the human form of BSE): "You've heard of made cow disease? This was mad candidate disease."

What has set off this serious concern? See Part 2 for Dr. Dean's wild, angry, demented ranting.