IF HE'S THE DUKE, THIS PICTURE IS THE ALAMO:

Dean and the Duke (Harold Meyerson, December 31, 2003, Washington Post)

Alone among the Democratic candidates, Dean understood that the law hadn't come yet to Dodge, that the party needed a tough guy who could unleash its long-suppressed animal instincts. And so Dean has pursued the same strategy that Bush has followed, but that his fellow Democrats have shunned: Cultivate the base. He gave the core Democrats, and the unaffiliated young, a meaningful vehicle to oppose the war and Bush's shredding of the social contract at home and international alliances abroad.

While the Republicans under Bush have consistently catered to the right, Dean is the first Democratic presidential candidate in years to have reached out so clearly to his party's liberal base.

And to that base, Dean's appeal is as much personal as programmatic.

The Deaniacs love him for the enemies he's made and his seeming determination to keep making them. He's as pugnacious as Bush, and just as inclined to shoot from the lip -- less from misspeaking, I surmise, than from a sense that at times he needs to assure the zealots in his ranks. Like Bush, he can alienate millions of people at such moments -- for instance, his refusal to immediately swat down the cockeyed notion that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance -- but, like Bush, by so doing he displays a solicitude even to the most feebleminded of his backers.

All this has made for an absolutely brilliant 2003, with Dean soaring into what is likely an insurmountable lead in the fight to become the party's nominee. The Democrats have needed a Wayne of their own, and there are signs -- Nancy Pelosi's increasingly assured leadership of the House Democrats, for one -- that this toughness is beginning to take hold beyond the confines of Deanland.

Mr. Bush has just had the three most successful legislative years since FDR in his first term. It is just not possible, as Mr. Meyerson contends, that he has achieved this by catering to the far right and that Ms Pelosi and her fellow congressional Democrats are pulling their act together, unless it is his thesis that even an effective Democratic opposition is ineffective against the GOP. If episodes like getting their heads handed to them on Medicare reform are really signs of what a newfound Dean-like toughness can do for the Democrats, then they're even further up the creek than they seem.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 1, 2004 9:52 AM