NAIL IN THE COFFIN FOR HOWARD DEAN
"Narcissist and Windbag"... Couldn't Have Said It Better

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Narcissist and Windbag
Howard Dean's self-destruction is reason to take heart.

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Wednesday, February 11, 2004

"Embarrassment of choice" is the ideal term for the current competition to decide on the precise moment of Howard Dean's flame-out. That celebrated primal shriek in Iowa has arguably been overdone, catalytic as it no doubt was for numerous latent anxieties on the part of Democrats. The latest pseudo-populist "You Choose" Dean ads for the Wisconsin campaign, featuring equally excruciating spots from "Steve," "Mike" and "Max," have already attracted hearty yucks even from the sort of voter who identifies with the LaFollette tradition of that great state. The Gore endorsement has been chosen, by Mr. Dean himself, as the point when things began to go what the English call "pear-shaped." With typical conceit and lack of grace, however, Mr. Dean selected this moment as the one when the "Washington establishment" began to fear him. And it's that breathtaking analysis which decides me on my own favorite among the rich choice of embarrassments.

It's not long since Mr. Dean publicly entreated Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to tell the other candidates to back off. Surely it was time, he argued, that his own pre-eminence be recognized and baptized and his rivals and critics made to feel petty and divisive. It's really quite difficult to imagine a more lofty "establishment" tactic: Who needs an election when we already have a designated "front-runner"? And who could possibly better represent the Beltway insider type than Mr. McAuliffe, a holdover from the bonanza years of Clintonian fund-raising and a professional organizer of the high-value ZIP-code donor?

Well before this, of course, I had experienced moments of shock unaccompanied by awe. Mr. Dean was simply appalling when he spun a yarn about a preteen girl supposedly impregnated by her father, and used it against parental notification of abortion. A physician has no business with demagogy of this kind even if the story is half-true, which in this case it apparently was not. And imagine the contempt that Mr. Dean must have felt for the pro-choice audience on whom he road-tested this potential but ultimately self-defeating fund-raising tactic.

It's always interesting when people don't seem to feel shame or embarrassment--and it's often not a very good sign-- so when Mr. Dean went on about his black roommates in college he was as toe-curlingly awful as when he condescended to those who display the Confederate flag. To be crass about both groups in a matter of weeks is quite something.

Worst of all was the heavy innuendo about the President's supposed foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 conspiracy. I think it is absolutely essential that no accusation of disloyalty be leveled against those who criticize the authorities in time of war: criticism at such a time being more of a civic duty than a right. If Mr. Dean had the smallest evidence of collusion or coverup at any level of the administration, one could have admired him for airing it, and never mind that Al-Jazeera might have used it for ammunition. What was really abysmal was that he knowingly took the latter risk without any foundation of seriousness. Before disowning it, he described this notorious piece of Internet paranoia as "rather interesting," which in a depraved way it is (not unlike the ingenuity of suggesting that Jews evacuated the twin towers just in time). So what are we to conclude--that he just thought it worth passing on?

I have now several times seen Mr. Dean saying that there is Islamic terrorism in Iraq now, but that there wasn't any before last March. If this means anything, it means that the activities of the bin Ladenist mercenaries in that country are the fault of George Bush. You can, I suppose, believe that if you care to. But watching, I realized something even more depressing: It's not just that Mr. Dean doesn't know anything at all about Iraq, it's that he doesn't care. His bored shrug at, first, the overthrow and, second, the capture of Saddam Hussein was a shrug of indifference as well as ignorance. And how can a man who flirts with moral equivalence between Washington and bin Laden expect to be listened to when he talks about a "distraction" from the hunt for the latter? He clearly thinks that the main enemy is at home.

I would not charge any of this against, say, Dennis Kucinich. He is in my opinion seriously wrong about the war, but not frivolously wrong. Not flippantly wrong, or irresponsibly wrong, or willing to please any old crowd with any old rant. This is not merely a difference of style. The misled and disappointed young people who are still wasting their time for Mr. Dean in Wisconsin had an idea that they wanted to emulate the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. There's no shame in that. The United States was very lucky--I would even say privileged--to have such candidates at such crucial times. These were and are men of principle and character, whose opponents were eventually compelled to acknowledge and respect them, and who were in some important matters proved right. After the 1974 midterms, the brilliant Democratic pollster and analyst Pat Caddell even found many people who claimed to have voted for Mr. McGovern when they had not. Nobody is going to look back on the Dean campaign with this kind of pride and nostalgia.

Look at it from one point of view, and you can take heart from all this. There are, clear across the country, people who sincerely cannot stand the policies or the personality of the president. When they say "ABB" (Anybody but Bush) they say it as if they really mean it. But there are limits, and Mr. Dean managed to find them in only a few weeks of cocky, half-baked and spendthrift posturing. This is not a time when the United States can afford even to flirt with the idea of an insecure narcissist and vain windbag as president. It's good to know that many liberals and leftists recognize that fact and act upon it, even when it costs them something.


Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is author, most recently, of "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq" (Plume, 2003).