So I hear that apparently Dean let out a holler out west in Iowa. Everyone seems to be talking about it, including Dave Winer, who offers this bit of information:
I was at Dean headquarters on the night of the Iowa caucuses, and I watched the Dean rant on TV in the office, with the other Web programmers. A few minutes before the speech they had a staff meeting in the conference room. Everyone was there except me and another guest. Not being a staffer, I didn't belong in the staff meeting. Several times during the meeting a loud crazy-sounding scream came from the room, everyone was doing it, and it was really frightening. The stuff of nightmares. This was before Howard Dean's rant. I asked Jim Moore what that was about, he said it's an Indian war yell or something like that, they used to do it in United Farm Workers rallies, and they adopted it at Dean For America. A few minutes later Dean let out the famous scream, it was the same scream I heard in the conference room.
Interesting, no? Suppose anyone will talk about this in regular media? Probably not. Anyway, I don't know how bad any of this is for Dean, but I was disheartened to hear about his appearance on Letterman last night. He's essentially playing along with the "Dean is a wild and crazy guy" image that's out there, in much the same way that Gore joked (jokes?) about having invented the internet. In my view he's just reinforcing that image when instead he should fight it. You never saw W go on Leno doing schtick about his mangled syntax, or Clinton on Letterman doing jokes about his love of the ladies, right? It's fine to laugh about our human frailties, but playing into the frenzy seems like a mistake to me.
Posted by Jason at January 23, 2004 11:49 AM