Editorial –

Dean Support Stays Firm
Amid The Politics of Farce

As anyone who reads The Bradley Report knows, just before the ‘Iowa Caucuses,’ we editorially supported Howard Dean as the best choice for the Democrats in this important election year.

Now that those unusual caucus meetings are over and Mr. Dean has come in third, after Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, and second after Mr. Kerry in New Hampshire’s first actual primary, we’ve been asked if we regret the endorsement, especially given Mr. Dean’s rambunctious post-defeat attempt to rally his Iowa troops that has been so exploited by the media.

The answer is simple: we don’t regret the endorsement.

Howard Dean is clearly a good man whose heart is in the right place. "I lead with my heart and not my head," he ironically said in trying to explain himself. Yet while we think most Americans would apply common sense to that remark and understand that what is really meant is that he trusts his own intellect and his natural instincts when candidly expressing himself. This is how people of good will talk with each other, and all of us know that, which is why Mr. Dean has reached and moved so many people.

Yet we also think that Mr. Dean and his aides ought to remember that the press is always waiting for something quotable that can be used over and over again, creating its own new context.

This is a sort of inversion of the concept of free speech; on the one hand, the press wants its own prerogatives held sacrosanct while it prods and urges public figures to greater candor, but then on the other hand the press wants to critique any public candor according to its own prism and then declare what was truly meant and what it reveals about the speaker. Washington politicians have learned how to be wary of the press, but newcomers to national politics often have to learn it the hard way. ‘Political speak’ is a form of language that the press very much helped to create, even though it bemoans it.

"I lead with my heart and not my head," replayed often enough, might make the candidate seem emotional rather than steady and intellectually sober. The same applies to demonstrable actions that give a good visual to the TV ‘journalists,’ a point the hard lesson of Iowa should have driven home.

In the news coverage of the ‘Iowa Caucuses,’ we have witnessed important national issues played out as the politics of farce. If the ‘mainstream’ American media had even a modicum of intellectual elegance it might be possible to become informed through reporting in which the context is solidly grounded with common sense, but clearly that is not the case. The reality instead is intellectual exploitation, a direct result of a cynical credo favoring the simplistic over the complex; i.e., quotes, sound bites and clips presented out of context instead of substance presented in accurate context.

Yet for all of the media farce, it remains obvious that the Democratic Party has fielded a number of well-qualified candidates for the presidency. We think that virtually all the Democratic candidates are decent people, and it is a relief to see them at least begin to unify and focus their energies in opposition to the GOP.

We remain convinced that Howard Dean would be an excellent presidential candidate, and if elected would be a good president. He is, after all, the first candidate, and for a long time the only candidate, who gave open and honest voice to the frustration that the people of the Democratic Party and many others have felt since Mr. Bush began implementing his policies, often with the aid of the Republican dominated Congress.

Mr. Dean deserves better than he has received from his fellow Democrats, and certainly deserves – but will never receive – a mea culpa if not an apology from the media, who once again exercised the building blocks game of creating a pedestal, placing a candidate on it, and then undermining it in every way possible to see when it will fall, and a new story therefore emerge.

We would have liked to see another turnaround, either putting Mr. Dean back in front or in a tie with Sen. Kerry, yet he rebounded from Iowa very well; he and John Kerry are clearly the leading contenders emerging from New Hampshire. But we are not at all disappointed in the possibility of John Kerry becoming the Democratic standard bearer. As longtime friend and associate, national advertising executive John L. Drugach II succinctly put it, "When you ask Kerry a question, he answers it!"

A Dean/Kerry ticket or a Kerry/Dean ticket would combine two strong and principled men with powerful intellects as the Democratic candidates for president and vice-president, but we think that such a pairing is very unlikely.

Dean and Kerry are New Englanders, and pragmatism will likely hold sway, so whomever is the presidential candidate will want to have a vice president from another part of the country, therefore we think North Carolina’s John Edwards, or possibly the former general from Arkansas, Wesley Clark, will be the likely candidate for vice president no matter who emerges as the presidential candidate.

And just as Mr. Dean himself declared he would do – with all the other candidates agreeing with him – we will support whoever becomes the nominee of the Democratic Party, for the simple reason that we are convinced that the current policies of Pres. George W. Bush and the Republican Party are profoundly detrimental to the nation.

In all events, we are anxious to see the primary process move quickly to completion and the Democrats full attention turned to where it belongs, in direct and unified opposition to Mr. Bush and the GOP.