HOWARD DEAN'S PRIMAL SCREAM

On some levels I really don't understand what all the hullabaloo is about. On other levels I understand it all too well.

Last Monday night, Howard Dean placed a disappointing third in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. In a rousing speech to a large group of his supporters, Dean promised to move on from Iowa and eventually win the nomination, to hit the campaign trail hard. The crowd was excited and emotional; Dean was excited and emotional--clearly, the former governor of Vermont was trying to make the lemons that had been tossed his way into lemonade. As far as I've been able to tell, this is how the speech was understood by his supporters who were in attendance.

At some point in the days following the speech, however, the corporate media punditocracy decided to portray this theatrical and political moment as something else: the media elite decided to tell America that Dean had gone nuts and is, therefore, unfit to be president.

By now, I've become used to this kind of media feeding frenzy over such utterly irrelevant (and sometimes utterly false) pieces of information. The endless cascade of self-righteous tirades against Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky comes to mind, as do the attacks against Al Gore, who never actually claimed to have invented the internet. I don't understand what could possibly be wrong with a rousing political speech, but I do understand how the corporate media just love to pick up bullshit, rub it all over themselves, breathe in deeply, taste it, and then sling it all over the place in a veritable festival of journalistic scatology.

Hate Dean because you don't like his politics: don't hate him because he gave a rousing speech that was cheered by his supporters.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I think his "yeeeeeaaaah!" was the coolest rock and roll scream since Roger Daltrey's second scream in the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." Surely, that's got to score Dean a few points.

Here's an excerpt from a Columbia Journalism Review blog post on the DeanScream frenzy that gets the point across in much more depth than I ever could:

Gov. Howard Dean's passionate post-caucus speech to his supporters last Monday may become a turning point in his political career -- not only because of the speech itself, but also because of the way in which the news media has shaped the coverage of the speech. While at first the campaign press generally reported the speech fairly, over the last few days several members of the media have indulged in cheap shots at Dean disguised as hard news reporting. In the process, the coverage, even amongst the same reporters, has gotten notably nastier, giving a negative cast to the speech -- and, as we have noted before, even going to so far as to question the candidate's mental health.

We have all seen this phenomenon before; this is the stage in the process at which the tale itself begins to wag the newshounds. So, sure enough, we now have some reporters writing pieces devoted solely to the storyline that they have helped to create.

Click here for the rest of the post. I highly recommend it; it's a pretty good analysis of how such media firestorms ignite.

On a humorous note, and just in case you hadn't already noticed, there are now tons of internet spawned remixes of Dean's rousing speech. Here is a link to a page that has collected a bunch. Check it out--my favorite is the one that replaces Robert Plant's scream in Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song" with Dean's scream.

Thanks to Eschaton for the links.

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