(Cont. from Part 1) Finally, in the seventh paragraph, we get a quotation from the speech that brought on all this sympathetic concern about Dr. Dean's mental stability. That's so much more interesting than that boring old style where they put the actual news in the first couple of paragraphs:
The reason for the shock and awe: a speech before 3,500 revved-up followers in Des Moines as he got the news of his clobbering in Iowa.
Dean pulled off his suit coat, rolled up his sleeves and, face red and arms punching the air, shouted: "We will not give up! We will not give up in New Hampshire! We will not give up in South Carolina! We will not give up in Arizona or New Mexico, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan!''
"We will not quit now or ever!'' the former Vermont governor shouted to a cheering crowd at the Val Air Ballroom as he prepared to leave the Hawkeye State. "We'll earn our country back for ordinary Americans!"
Followed by: "Yeahhaaaaaaaaaaaaa!''
He said "Yee-haw"? He said "Yee-haw"?!?! And this makes him an "angry" man suffering from degenerative neurological disease?
This is not serious reporting. His opponents may be serious about attacking him. But, I'm sorry, if Dean's biggest character failing is that he responded to a setback in his campaign by giving a peppy speech to encourage supporters and said "Yee-haw," we should make the man President for life.
I've never found the "angry Dean" meme very convincing, because I've never seen anything from him that looked like a tendency to hot-headedness. He certainly hasn't seemed to lose his composure in debates where the attacks were largely focused on him.
Now, the Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci tells us that Dean is angry, angry to the point of psychiatric disability ... because he said "Yee-haw" at a rally! This is a sad, sad excuse for political reporting.
2 comments:
Bruce, I think the problem is that yelling is not very presidential, it scares people because of its association with demagoguery. I can't think of too many recent US presidents who have yelled in public. FDR never did, though he almost certainly did in private occasionally, e.g. to Joe Kennedy. Perhaps the best public image a potential president can project is to look inspired but boring (safe) also.
Some, maybe all, of FDR's speeches from the 1936 campaign where he was blasting the "economic royalists" would have made Dean's rah-rah peroration in Iowa sound like a lackluster pep talk from a junior high coach. And the economic royalists of 1936 thought Roosevelt was very "un-Presidential," i.e., he favored dangerous radical ideas like Social Security insurance. - Bruce
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