> I suspect that Obama's aim is to rebuild the bonfire of Howard Dean's
> grass-roots campaign, minus the scream. But raging infernos don't
> just happen. First comes courage. Dean never would have had his
> bonfire if he hadn't opposed the invasion of Iraq in clear, plain,
> inspiring English. Even then, Dean had trouble stoking the fire: the
> campaign was failing long before his fatal Iowa mating call. It had
> become a campaign cult, too enamored with itself, with too much
> blabber about the money being raised on the Web and not enough about
> issues other than Iraq.
Maybe I'm misremembering this, but I'm pretty sure that Dr. Dean also had a lot of proposals about health insurance and domestic issues--maybe too many for some people's comfort. He was hardly a single issue candidate except in so far as there was only one issue anyone wanted to talk about (WAR ON TERROR) and he happened to have a different position on this. The blabber about raising money and netroots was a consequence of the way that the US media tends to cover major elections: as a horserace to raise money which you use to play in a poker game where you hedge yourself into a winning position. Thus that's all Klein remembers. They might as well cover the whole thing on another affiliate of ESPN.
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