<snip>
But the truth is that Dean's campaign was doomed from the day in December when he won the endorsement of former vice president Al Gore.
Put aside for a moment the question of why he thought Gore's endorsement could do him much good. By the end of last year, Gore was really not the Washington insider Dean seemed to think he was securing. The former vice president lost his key to the clubhouse when he so narrowly blew the 2000 campaign and then -- in part for admirable reasons -- absented himself from politics for the next two years.
No, it was the mere act of wooing and winning Gore's imprimatur that doomed -- or at least foretold the death of -- Howard Dean's crusade. For it undermined the very premise of Dean's campaign, which was that politics could be about the voters' passionate belief in one man who hedged no bets and played no traditional games. The endorsement was Dean's capitulation to the idea that he ultimately needed the Washington establishment on his side. From that time on, he made a series of compromises, amateurishly executed, that showed a fatal loss of nerve.
Washington Post