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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (525153)	1/16/2004 2:56:30 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

THE LAST WORD Weekly Standard Newsletter, January 16, 2004 I'll be honest with you: I can't get enough of Howard Dean. I have a Flat Howard tacked up on my wall at the office (and boy howdy he's a wee fella'!). I have four or five books about him stacked on my desk. His blog is the first thing I read in the morning and the last thing I read at night. Everything about him is fascinating--his supporters, his virtual community, his approach toward the Internet, his positions on the war. But the most fascinating aspect of Dean is his attitude towards presidential politics. In "One-Car Caravan," the excellent book on the early portion of the 2004 campaign, author Walter Shapiro asks Dean why he decided to run for president. Dean responds: "The answer should be that I deeply care about it, and I thought it all out. But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it. I know that doesn't make any sense. It sounds like I'm just a very ambitious person who wants to be president." From there, it's a straight line to a quote from Dean on his blog this morning: "This election is about power--we're going to change this country because we're all going to take the power back!" In the Dean worldview--and in the Deaniac worldview, too--there is no national or public interest. There's Us and Them. You have to go back a long ways to find a presidential candidate with such a bleak, anti-communitarian outlook--all the way back to 1992 and Pat Buchanan (some might argue the need to go back to Huey Long). I can't wait to see if, like Buchanan, the party establishment and electorate will eventually drive Dean out, or if the good doctor will succeed where Pitchfork Pat failed. The next few weeks should be great. Stay tuned . . . Best, Jonathan V. Last