Howard Dean: Back On The Cool List

[madfloridian]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/11/opinion/lynch/main673391.shtml

SNIP..."Bob Schieffer is fond of relating words of wisdom of our former colleague George Herman, who passed away this week. Herman used to say that CBS was like high school. There was a "cool list." Sometimes you were on it and sometime you were off, and you never had any idea how you got on it in the first place or why you were suddenly off.

Howard Dean knows a lot about cool lists, but he probably has a good idea of why he was on, off and now back on it again. The Dean boomlet of 2003 was one part political courage, one part smart primary politics and one part media frenzy. By 2004, the bubble burst and the worm turned. The media types who had pumped him up seemed to take particular delight in knocking him down. And the courageous and exciting Dean, who burst into the Democratic Party meeting in February 2003 claiming to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, became the gaffe prone, risky, abrasive "pin cushion" of the other candidates and the Democratic establishment."

SNIP...""Pragmatism," said longtime Dean strategist Steve McMahon, explaining the change in tone a couple of weeks ago. "They see the handwriting on the wall." The DNC members apparently bought Dean's pitch: the need to build up the state parties (25 percent of the 447 voters are chairs and vice chairs); his proven ability to raise small-donor money; his commitment to grassroots organizing; and his track record as head of the Democratic Governors Association, where he was a team player and not a bomb thrower.

Dean worked these 447 members relentlessly and it has paid off. The folks who launched him onto that cool list two years ago, when he spoke to their disappointment over the 2002 elections and anger at their party leaders' vote authorizing the president to use force in Iraq, are about to put him back on the list. Cool. Way cool....."END SNIP

[brainshrub]

1. Dean will always be on my cool list.

During lunch period he can at my table with all the other cool kids.