No, Seriously, the Doctor is OUT

Following up what I thought would be a weekly series, the New Yorker finally published a fawning feature on Howard Dean, some 60 weeks after publishing the one-two punch of fawns over Kerry and Lieberman. Maybe they’ve written about Dean before. Who knows, who cares. It’s the New Yorker. And now that I’m an official subscriber to Critical Inquiry, motherfuckers, I can be a snob against the élitist windbags publishing under the Cond&eacute Nast banner who would like nothing better than to diminish �i�ek into being just a lovable old coot of a slav who says funny things that make America look shitty. I’m repeating myself. Yet until Slam sends in his change-of-address form, I’ll continue getting the rag, and then I’ll continue to put off homework by reading it.

In any case, this issue also had an article on why SUVs suck. I know–news comes slow to New York. Who knew that Howard Dean was popular? That it was easier to avoid accidents with a Jetta than a TrailBlazer? But the underlying pressure of the SUV article is still pretty valuable, for the rhetorical trick I will employ below. So the pressure is this: in buying into the SUV craze, Americans are moving from being actually safe (“if something happens, my car is nimble enough and engineered well enough to help me avoid major catastrophe”) to simply feeling safe (“if I hit something, I’m in such a huge fucking object that it doesn’t matter”). Being safe: close to the road, driving defensively. Feeling safe: towering above, fooled by 4wd.

So this shift is also indicated in Mark Singer’s piece on Dean. Democrats have moved away from actually good candidates and have cast in their lot with a candidate who simply feels good. I’m honing my criticism of the doctor these days, since I admit that I got a bit wound up in the easy punditry that seemingly everyone is still busy splashing around in. I don’t dislike Dean because he’s angry, or because he can’t beat Bush, or any of that stuff. In fact, this piece, being a fluff piece, actually made me almost sort of like the guy. I dislike Dean since I think he’s a maniac and will simply not make a good President, and that Democrats are being fooled into thinking that they’re spineless and have no direction, which makes them lust after a tough-ass candidate who gets everyone a little wet.

Towards the end, Singer starts anticipating my crit, even sort of laying the track for my silly little Be/Feel dichotomy, by starting to describe how Clinton came into the office with a Grand Scheme already years and years old. Shrub, he adds, came in with eminences whispering in his ear, which gave the illusion (at least, I guess, to Camille Paglia) that he’d be an even-handed and thoughtful President[1] who would compensate for his own stupidity by building a good Cabinet. Dean, though, seems to be winging it, and his efforts to give some depth to that improvisational style all come up empty.

He brags in one place how in college, he would write a 10-page paper the day it was due. I mean, I’ve done the same. And he also rationalised it the same way: he’d actually be thinking about the paper for weeks beforehand, but would just sort of sit down and emete the whole thing after it had been cooking in his head-oven. The problem here, though, is that there is a large difference between a paper for college (where he still only managed a 2.7), and being President. Singer implicitly even hints at this when he reminds us of how small Vermont is. For a politician so interested in building a code based on what voters want, the leap from 700,000 constituents to 250 million will be rather drastic, I think.

Dean admits to Singer that he doesn’t have a plan. Maybe he’s being coy–and will backpedal on Inauguration Day and say, “actually, I’ve thought about all this stuff for a very long time,” but for how much Singer likes Dean, he can’t totally forgive this. And I can’t, either. I worry that we’ll be saying about Dean in three years, “well, at least he’s our Shrub.”

1. Appointed by the Supreme Court, 2000.