Reporters Shift Gears on The Dean Bus
Iowa Vote and Outburst Rewrite the Campaign Saga
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 23, 2004; Page C01
LEBANON, N.H., Jan. 22
The reporters are all talking about the implosion.
As Howard Dean campaigned across New Hampshire on Thursday, the journalists trailing him were conscious of watching history unfold, but not the Internet-fueled surge to victory they had thought they were covering.
When a candidate loses his footing, even fleeting moments seem to feed the larger narrative.
Thus it was that when Dean showed up at Lou's Restaurant in Hanover -- for the sort of event where he orders hot chocolate while 11 photographers behind the counter snap away -- the first customer he encountered was Marisa Kraus, holding a Bush-Cheney sticker.
"Governor Dean -- what about the scream?" she taunted.
"Tell us: was it cathartic?"
"It was great, it was cathartic, yahoo," Dean muttered sarcastically, moving on to the next table.
The press pack, too, was still riffing on Dean's guttural, post-Iowa rant, with a tape circulating that set the shouting to rap, rock and techno-pop music.
There were jokes about the newly subdued doctor writing himself a prescription for Valium and how the malfunctioning electrical outlets on the bus showed that the "you have the power" campaign was out of juice. Dean's raspy hoarseness added to the sense that he had lost his voice.
For the media, the story now is not so much about pitting Dean against John Kerry, John Edwards or Wesley Clark as exploring the psychodrama of Dean vs. Dean. Journalists quizzed advisers all day, delving into the mystery that has dogged the doctor since he burst onto the national stage: Who, exactly, is this guy? Reasonable moderate or reckless hothead?
But despite their occasionally testy relations with the former Vermont governor, those aboard the press bus seemed slightly amazed that their high-speed ride might abruptly end if Dean loses the primary Tuesday.
A symbiotic relationship often envelops a presidential campaign and its media chroniclers as both sides eat, drink and travel together, even as they spar over access, spin and controversial stories.
But the better the candidate does, the quicker the correspondents are catapulted to prominence and, possibly, the White House. When a candidate fizzles, as Dick Gephardt did in Iowa, his press corps also hits a dead end.
The commentators who once saw Dean flying so high wasted no time in declaring a new conventional wisdom.
"Howard Dean is done," Fox News's Fred Barnes told viewers Wednesday. "He's finished. . . . He's gone."
If the media have been obsessed with Dean's come-from-nowhere candidacy over the past six months, the candidate has not been bashful about pushing back. He frequently pores over 40-page packets of press clippings, sometimes grousing that his words have been misconstrued by reporters and permanently enshrined in Lexis-Nexis. Journalists say campaign aides regularly tell them that Dean "liked" or "hated" their latest story.
"He's been openly critical of the coverage he's gotten, and his staff complains about it routinely," MSNBC correspondent Felix Schein said. He said some of Dean's advisers maintain privately that Dean should do more hard-news TV interviews, while others are convinced that "no matter what he does, the coverage will be negative. That's troubling. If he's not prepared to do 'Meet the Press,' is he prepared to be president?"
Dean has remained at least occasionally accessible to his swelling press corps, but there have been arguments about ground rules. When Dean's wife, Judy, made a rare appearance in Iowa on Sunday, aides brought her on the press bus but insisted the session be off the record. Several reporters, led by the Boston Globe's Glen Johnson, objected, prompting everyone else to move with the candidate's wife to a second bus.
"I said no way, on a bus we paid for, on a day when she's the central focus of the story," Johnson said. "She was in front of 3,000 people cheering her name."
The new Howard Dean, trying to shake the "too angry" label, was on display at an opera house in Claremont, holding himself in check like a man trying to simmer a pot of water without bringing it to a boil. The rally seemed almost therapeutic at times as Dean began attacking President Bush -- "Here's what really burns me up, this is so dumb" -- and several supporters tried to buck him up. The hall erupted in applause when one woman challenged those who say "you should be behaving differently -- don't listen to them, Howard!"
Dean kept returning to the subject of the media, using a question about food safety to cite his favorite new statistic: "Ninety percent of us apparently get our news from 11 corporations." He expressed amazement that, according to a recent survey, "80 percent of the viewers of Fox television believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11,"compared with 30 percent of those who listen to National Public Radio.
Despite a joke about "fair and balanced" Fox News, Dean added, "I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe all the media is all right wing or left wing."
But it wouldn't take a media conspiracist to conclude that the media, at least on this day, would not let go of Dean's Des Moines outburst.
At a news conference in Claremont, Ron Fournier of the Associated Press asked: "Didn't you realize you were speaking to the country and maybe the world?"
"I thought in context it would be fine," Dean said.
Was it a mistake? "There's a zillion mistakes I've made."
"Are you basically saying you were faking your enthusiasm?" asked the New York Post's Vince Morris.
"Of course not," Dean said.
By taping a Diane Sawyer interview for broadcast last night with his wife, "are you trying to soften your image?," asked a local reporter. Dean said he was trying "to show there's another side of me."
Jodi Wilgoren of the New York Times asked about Dean's "self-restraint," saying: "I see you holding yourself back."
"It's hard to hit those high notes when you don't have any voice left," Dean said.
Dan Hausle of Boston's WHDH-TV asked whether the candidate was "apologizing" for his Iowa outburst.
"What I'm saying is, I'm not perfect. I have warts. Sometimes I get very passionate."
Still another cut to the chase: "Which candidate are you? . . . Which is Howard Dean?"
"All I can do is be who I am," Dean said tersely.
Jay Carson, a Dean spokesman, said the candidate has "laughed off" his much-mocked Iowa yelling as "an excited moment. The real question is, why are we talking for the fourth day in a row about less than 30 seconds of a speech in Iowa when there are 9 million Americans unemployed, 43 million Americans without health insurance and people are dying in Iraq?"
For all the signs of a struggling campaign, some media veterans are urging caution. Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times said the Iowa bounce that seems to be propelling Kerry past Dean in New Hampshire has often proven short-lived.
Dean "could fall through the floor, or he could be poised for a Clinton-like finish here," Brownstein said. "The difference is most candidates have not blown themselves up on national television."
Still, he said, "you can go overboard. We need to be really sensitive to not writing him off prematurely."
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