The Drs. Dean, one sane & one not
Editorial - New York Daily News.
Howard Dean's temperament was called into serious question after his maniacal outburst at a rally following his third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Things got worse yesterday. Now there's a question about Dean's sanity.
The good doctor announced, in response to a query, that if elected, he would dump Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He may as well have said he'd dethrone the Pope.
Greenspan is the most successful Fed chairman ever. He has played a more important role in fostering the growth of the U.S. and global economies than any world leader. His calibrated monetary policy has kept inflation, the greatest threat to prosperity, at record lows while providing the stimulus the economy needed to grow after the Internet bubble burst.
If you are among the millions of Americans who took advantage of rock-bottom interest rates to buy homes or refinance mortgages, you have Greenspan to thank. You can thank him as well if your retirement account has begun to recover from the pounding it took over the past couple of years.
Greenspan's economic influence is so respected that the markets would likely tank were President Bush to hint at dumping him. That they didn't go into a tailspin yesterday tells you that the smart money has written Dean off as a viable candidate for the White House.
On Thursday, Dean and his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, were interviewed for television by Diane Sawyer. By appearing with his rarely seen wife, Dean hoped to rescue his foundering campaign, and he acknowledged that his Iowa screaming was not presidential. He fell even further below that standard by offhandedly calling for Greenspan's ouster.
As for Judith Dean, well, she no more belongs in the White House than her husband does. But in her case, that's a compliment. By all outward signs, Judith Dean is a wife, mother and physician, with none of the grasping pretenses of politics.
Her appearance with Dean on ABC-TV's "Primetime Thursday" suggested she is centered on work and family and would be happy to devote herself entirely to those pursuits. She's neither stylish nor packaged and couldn't give a hoot about it.
Most potential First Ladies tramp the campaign trail and moon at their husbands. Judith Dean has other priorities: a son in high school and a medical practice. As she told Sawyer: "It's my own private practice, and my patients are my patients, and they really depend on me, and I really love it. It's not something I can say, 'Oh, you can take over for a month.' It just doesn't work that way."
Seeming entirely genuine, Judith Dean told the primped and glamorous Sawyer that she expected to be criticized for paying little attention to her hair style or fashion, but didn't care. Judith Dean clearly has her head on straight. She may or may not view herself as a feminist, but she has liberated herself in many good ways. |
