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Andrew Stephen- screams for Howard Dean Andrew Stephen - America Monday 14th February 2005 There is a hint of spring in the air in Washington these days, and that may be why I am suddenly seized with optimism about the Democratic Party. I can't help feeling, against the flow of what everybody else is saying, that we are about to see it entering a much more successful era. Indeed, I suspect the dreadful complacency of the Clinton years, the flawed candidature of Al Gore and the incompetent campaign of John Kerry may soon be forgotten after a meeting here on 12 February.
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The consensus wisdom is that Dean will alienate Middle America and even further marginalise the Democrats. This is partly sustained by the media myth of his "scream" in the Iowa primaries. In fact, the "scream" came when he was rallying supporters in a very noisy hall through a directional microphone that amplified his voice and screened out background noise. In the hall itself, his "scream" sounded like normal political rhetoric. -- So Dean could well pilot the Democrats into an exciting new era: he says he sees the Democrats as "the party of reform . . . reforming America's financial situation, reforming our electoral process, reforming healthcare, reforming education and putting morality back in our foreign policy". Unlike Clinton, Gore or Kerry, he does not wait for focus groups to tell him what to say. He is inspired not by Clintonism, but rather by the insurgency of Newt Gingrich and the "Christian Coalition" in the early 1990s.
snip- But a Dean chairmanship carries dangers. The Republicans amassed mountains of dirt on him last year; in particular, they zeroed in on how he won a medical exemption from military service and then went skiing for months. He has some personal skeletons, too.
www.newstatesman.com/200502140022
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