December 9, 2003
TANNED, RESTED, AND READY?:
The Mysterious Stranger (DAVID BROOKS, 12/09/03, NY Times)
My moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people. . . ."Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him.
It was then that I saw how Dean had liberated himself from his past, liberated himself from his record and liberated himself from the restraints that bind conventional politicians. He has freed himself to say anything, to be anybody. [...]
The philosopher George Santayana once observed that Americans don't bother to refute ideas — they just leave them behind. Dean shed his upper-crust WASP self, then his centrist governor self, bursting onto the national scene as a mysterious stranger who comes out of nowhere to battle corruption. [...]
The only problem is that us rural folk distrust people who reinvent themselves. Many of us rural folk are nervous about putting the power of the presidency in the hands of a man who could be anyone.
The really spooky thing is that the personal anger he's tapping into for his stump speeches must be equally unattached. In other words, he could be that angry at anyone or anything that opposed whichever position he'd adopted at the moment.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2003 5:00 PM
Dean kinda has that Clinton-like ability to make stuff up. People fall for that stuff.
Posted by: pchuck at December 9, 2003 5:06 PMBut his honor is pure and his courage as well,
And he's fair and he's true and he's boring as hell-
And he'll go to the grave as an angry old man.
The thing that makes me nervous is that once he wins the nomination, he will reinvent himself to be more moderate, especially on terrorism and the war in Irag, and that the American people will fall for it. Your thoughts?
Posted by: Jana at December 9, 2003 5:24 PMHis goal is not to become President to accomplish anything, other than to be able to say that he is President and bask in the attendent glory.
We had eight years of that type of narcissism during the 1990s when we could afford it. Can we afford it, again? Is it something we want, again?
Jana - If that scenario scares you, you ought to be horrifed (I am) about Hillary pulling the same out. Even some posters here have been giving her credit for, essentially, not being Howard Dean and Ralph Nader.
Posted by: MG at December 9, 2003 5:45 PM"Us rural people . . . ."
I'm sure that any day now we'll see that grammatical faux pas on Slate's Bushism feature.
Posted by: "Edward" at December 9, 2003 5:50 PMAs refugees from NYC and suburban Connecticut, we lived and worked in a college town in Vermont for 15 years. People like Dean are everywhere. Pretending to be "just folks" when it pleases them, but sending for the family Lear jet or helicopter when they want to get away.
It's a hold over from their hippie days. They work at the coop, or raise sheep or make pots and they really believe, like Dean, that they've gotten back to basics and are living as one with the spirit of the earth and they love all living things, etc. You get the point.
Vermonters call these nutcases flatlanders and wish they'd all go back where they came from and stop trying to help them. Like most people Vermont natives want to be left alone to live as they wish.
Howard Dean is about a nasty and foul person one could come up with, minus Gore and the Clintons. See a pattern here??
Posted by: Neil at December 9, 2003 7:30 PMBush would have said "Us rural folks..." At least the president knows how to speak Populist proper.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at December 10, 2003 7:34 AMNormally, I read right over all the posts here (and news stories generally) about the Democratic pretenders. What's the opposite of a beauty contest, an ugly contest?
But this one stopped me. Why cannot Dean have become a rural person? I don't know anything about his personal life, but just because you grow up in New York, that doesn't mean you cannot become rural.
I don't know if it's still valid, but an Ivy Leaguer I used to work with told me that the student paper at Dartmouth used to publish on its front page the weekly census of cows and people in Vermont "and it was always real close."