Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part II

In which your humble servant goes on for too long about a throwaway comment on MTP which I found to be infuriatingly revealing.

Because as we all know, according to the Kafkaesque rules of American politics, years ago, behind a formidable and anonymous pair of large oak doors somewhere in Washington, some invisible compact was entered into on our behalf by people we have never met and without out knowledge or consent.

And according to the terms of this compact, Dems are required to play Charlie Brown to the GOP's Lucy-and-the-football

until the end of time.

Supposed to be play well-intentioned but hapless, boneless losers, who never fight back, never raise their voices, and who slowly triangulate away workers rights, civil rights, human rights and Constitutional rights to the rapacious, unstoppable GOP machine.

Supposed to sell the last of the New Deal at remaindered prices to a gang of wannabe fascists and fake Christians, in exchange for which they get to keep their jobs for a few more cycles.

We are supposed to mope hopelessly, and whine nasally, and behave like a species going extinct in the face of the inexorable rise of the Grand Old Perverts.

And then die quietly off. And then Jebus can finally come back. smite the Swarthy Hordes and make Conservative White Christian Imbeciles all as rich as pirates!

Or something.

And in 2003-2004, Dr. Howard Dean was queering the fuck out of that deal, even as Edwards and Obama (And, ok, Kucinich. And Dodd. And Richardson. And Biden. And, sure, WTFm why not Gravel too.) are collectively threatening to queer the deal now.

Which is why the Mouse Circus was handed over to the Hillary half of the Clinton Machine last week, and all but turned over to her husband this week.

It was the Establishmentarians saying, loud and clear: “We Have Chosen! So Let It Be Broadcast! So Let It Be Done!”

And thus another page is slipped into the Broderite Book of Common Prayer.

Here’s the quote from MTP:

RUSSERT: Tavis Smiley, it was interesting in 2004, Howard Dean was ahead in Iowa, and the voters chose John Kerry. Many of them admitted that it was a strategic vote, that they were passionate about Dean, but they thought Kerry could perhaps be a better general election candidate.
…

Someone needs to tell Punkin Haid that a lie of omission is still a lie. Because while this little, innocuous drop in is factually correct – history shows voters obviously did vote that way – in no way did voters reach that conclusion without a major cattle prod to the ass giddily and incessantly delivered via the media driving them in that direction.

Because from the way he was cast as unstable and reckless early on, to the “Dean Scream”, what was done to Dr. Dean was a hit job from start to finish.

His shout out to his people after Iowa was a case where literally one microphone at one rally where the Doctor was trying to raise the flagging spirits of his troops (and where all contextualizing crowd noise was suppressed) was magically, unbelievably, transmuted into a sword.

And with that lie in hand, the Media went collectively monkeyshit, gleefully replaying that one clip literally hundreds of times in the following week.

And why?

Well let’s run a dredge down the Media Memory Hole and see if we can’t try realsuperhard to catch a little tenor of the times back then…

All what follows was excerpted from Great Dreams.com which compiled an excellent cross-section of media and DLC-type opinion regarding Dr. Dean during that period (emphasis added almost randomly.)


Baltimore Sun's Paul West:

"He has not become the darling of the national media corps, which regards him as thin-skinned and prone to complain about tough reporting, sometimes even before an article has appeared in print."

The New York Post’s Deborah Orin:

"Democrats are starting to realize upstart antiwar candidate Howard Dean could actually wind up as their 2004 nominee -- thanks to the power of the Internet. That scares some of them silly.
…

New York Daily News columnist Zev Chafets let all the superlatives out of the barn to describe Dean’s mediocre performance on Meet The Press as…

"… perhaps the worst performance by a presidential candidate in the history of television."

Andrew Sullivan, always up for a pile-on, opined…

"I didn't see what many are calling a disastrous performance by Howard Dean on 'Meet The Press,' but I know from observing him and debating him once that he's an intemperate, arrogant bully. . . . It's a trait bad doctors have. They are used to being in such controlling positions vis-a-vis their patients that it goes to their heads. Good doctors resist such an obvious temptation.

Slate's William Saletan thought Dean had a problem with foreign policy, even though he could not be troubled to mention exactly what it might be:

"For months, I've been scratching my head over the Howard Dean problem. On domestic issues, Dean beats the rest of the presidential field hands down. He knows the nooks and crannies of all the policy debates. He's been an executive. He's principled where he ought to be principled and pragmatic where he ought to be pragmatic. He hurls fire and brimstone with the best of them. He isn't one of those wishy-washy liberals who inspire contempt on both the left and the right. And he states his views in a way that everyone can understand and most people can support.

"The problem is national security. It isn't just Dean's opposition to the war in Iraq, which is eminently defensible. It's subtler and broader. Every time Dean talks about foreign affairs, he gives off a whiff of hostility or indifference to American military power."

Got that? A "whiff". No citation. No critique. Just…Smells Like Dean Spirit.


The New Republic (siding, the site notes, “with a Weekly Standard piece on Democrats we excerpted earlier this week -- to a point”) beefs up the Seriousness Firewall by allying with David Fucking Brooks to warn the Dems against letting Howard Dean get to third base wit them.

Or something.

"We more or less agree with David Brooks--that many Democrats' visceral hatred of George W. Bush and the Republican majorities in Congress risks becoming self-defeating, since it could easily result in a nominee who is too liberal to win the presidential election in 2004, and a party that alienates moderates and gets slaughtered on the congressional level as well. But one thing we have to take issue with is Brooks's dismissiveness toward Democrats' explanations of their own powerlessness.

And the reaction by this thin-skinned, petulant bully to losing to John Kerry?

From this at MSNBC...

DR. DEAN: It was a tough campaign, one that I did not win. Evidently more Democrats did not agree with me than agreed with me, and I accept that. The great thing about a democracy is that you have a vote. And, you know, people say, "Oh, aren't you angry?" I'm not the least bit angry about the way the campaign turned out. John Kerry won fair and square. And now the question is: Are we all going to pull together as a team or not?
...

And from PBS...

HOWARD DEAN: Look, we wanted to change this country, and we wanted to change the way the Democratic Party works. I think we did change the way the Democratic Party works. I think our supporters essentially wrote the Democratic Party platform, but you can't always make all the changes you want immediately.

My argument to my supporters, most of them are going to support John and they already have. I was online with his supporters and many of my folks came on, they gave him money. You know, we're in the business and well along in the business of trying to support John Kerry, but for those who are thinking about voting a -- voting for a third party the choice is very simple.

Either John Kerry or George Bush is going to be the next president of the United States. If it's George Bush, this country is in deep, deep trouble. If it's John Kerry, we've taken the first step by sending this president back to Texas permanently towards a better America, a new America, a more optimistic and hopeful America, an America that listens to the truth.

There's no question in my mind, and this is why I don't feel the least bit troubled or ambivalent about endorsing John, because there's no question in my mind he'd be a better president than George Bush, and, therefore, I have no question, no hesitation in recommends him to the people who supported me during the campaign.

Later, after scary Howard Dean had been methodically gaffed and gutted by the Media and by his own Party, Novacula gleefully stepped up to perform his own post-mortem duties.

Beginning the job of cementing in place the Received Wisdom which Russert will so blithely regurgitate almost three years later.

Howard Dean's return

Thursday, December 16, 2004 Posted: 5:26 PM EST (2226 GMT)

WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- Practical Democratic politicians, intent on reversing a decade of decline, feel trapped in a bad dream with Howard Dean as the most prominent prospect to be the party's national chairman.

The mere thought of picking the 2004 presidential candidate who campaigned furthest to the left and was soundly repudiated by Democratic voters suggests inability to cope with political reality.

Dean has toned himself down, no longer resembling the screamer in Des Moines or the radical populist on the campaign trail.

His Sunday interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" was so polite that it instantly was labeled the "unscream." Nevertheless, Dean as national chairman would identify Democrats as the party of the Left, more interested in purity than victory.
…

So what really happened?

Broadcasting & Cable news here summed it up nicely.

Howard Dean: Scream 'Never Happened'

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/14/2004 3:25:00 PM

Howard Dean said the scream speech "never happened," and that its repetition more than 900 times in the following week showed cable "at its worst" and revealed cable news as a "Murdochized" entertainment medium, not journalism.

The former Vermont governor and presidential candidate calls it part of the "Murdochization," of cable, referring to the growing success of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel. "Not because Murdoch is a right winger, which he is," says Dean, "but because [Fox News Channel head] Roger Ailes is so incredibly good at what he does that the other stations [sic] are starting to copy what Fox does."

Dean told a crowd of broadcasters in Washington Monday morning that all the cable networks showed of the speech following his loss in Iowa was "me at a microphone carrying on. No crowd noise or crowd shot," that would have shown that the crowd was screaming and Dean was trying to make himself heard. None of the pool reporters reported the scream initially, he said. It was only the next day, when their editors saw it, with the noise-canceling mike making Dean stand out, that it became a story. "The speech as it was portrayed in cable television shows 937 times in one week "never happened," he said.

Of course, loads of broadcasters carried the speech too, but Dean suggested they were being driven by the cable news cycle. He told his audience they had better news instincts about what to cover than their national counterparts and should not let the 24-hour news cycle set their agendas for them.

Jim Farley, VP, news and programming, for WTOP (AM) Washington seconded Dean's assessment of the "Scream," saying reporters covering the speech had felt it was proportionate to the crowd and the occasion. "The news media done him wrong," said Farley.

Dean did not lay all the blame for his precipitous fall from front-runner to Monday-morning quarterback on cable news, however, pointing out that he had already lost Iowa and that he did not use the platform of the speech to address a national audience.

Still, Dean had little good to say about the national media, warning local broadcasters that to aspire to a national post was "the path to ruin," saying the national media "doesn't understand its role," and is too into "gotcha" journalism. He says he avoided Tim Russert and Meet the Press for months not because Russert isn't good but because of the "gotcha" fear, which turned out to be prophetic, he said, since Russert's one "bad" question, about troop strengths, came back to bite the candidate when he finally did appear.
…

The shorter version?

Whom the Media Gods would coronate they would first dub Serious, Inevitable, Presidential and Chock Full ‘O Gravitas.

Whom the Media Gods would destroy they would first aggressively frame as Frivolous, Weak, Liberal or Mad.

And so ends Part II.