Howard Dean is too insane to be president.
Or, if you prefer, he's too awesome. With some people there's not much difference.
The Vermont doctor is truly amazing, a creature of unstoppable hilarity. Every time you think he's done being nuts, he gives you something new to marvel at, or someone new to remind you of.
When Dean cut off a heckler by chanting the "Star-Spangled Banner," it was eerily reminiscent of the titular huckster in Tim Robbins' political mockumentary "Bob Roberts." But every time Dean rolls back his shirtsleeves, breaks out the orange caps and taps into a crowd's restless anger using pro-wrestling style theatrics, he's the spitting image of Martin Sheen's presidential aspirant from the 1983 film "The Dead Zone," whom Christopher Walken had to stop from blowing up the world. Perhaps National Review's Jonah Goldberg nailed it best when he said that Dean reminded him of the Incredible Hulk "in that interim stage just before Bruce Banner turns green and starts to rip his clothes."
Partisan sniping, says you? Examine the facts.
Item: Exactly a year ago today, Dean abused the concept of hyperbole beyond acceptable levels and proclaimed at a National Abortion Rights Action League dinner that if President Bush continued on his anti-abortion path, U.S. women would soon not be allowed to go to school.
Item: Dean has taken the rolled-up shirtsleeves-look to such heights, it's as though he thinks that his manly forearms make him presidential material.
Item: Dean famously proclaimed that he wanted to win the support of southern guys with Confederate flags in the backs of their pickup trucks, even though he later admitted that such people are racist. Meet the newest activist group, "Racists for Dean!"
Item: After Bush's State of the Union address this Tuesday, Howard Dean delivered a non-response in which he declared that the president needs to be replaced with "a proven, experienced leader." Apparently six years as the governor of the country's second-largest state and three years as the U.S. commander in chief is not "experience," but babysitting the homogenous voting block of all 75 people in Vermont is.
Item: In what is becoming that other Howard's (Stern, of course) favorite new gag, Dean roared after he came in third in this week's Iowa caucuses. The sound was so high-pitched and inhuman that the most apt description of it came from a caller on KFYI's Liddy and Hill show, who suggested that after Dean gets out of politics he might have a lucrative future in Japan doing the voice of Godzilla.
Forget that Howard Dean is wildly inconsistent or that he represents the Moveon.org wing of the Democratic Party - he roared. George W. Bush may have made some bizarre flukes as a public speaker, but for goodness' sake, he never roared.
If he were merely an Internet celebrity, Dean would be tops. His wackiness would have a place in the magical land that brought us the "All Your Base" video and fatchicksinpartyhats.com.
In fact, Dean's behavior almost seems to be manufactured by an out-of-control PR campaign's attempt to make a candidate who was so unpredictable, so blustery, so awesome, that you couldn't help but love him. Bill Clinton was the man from hope, Howard Dean is the man from awesome.
How else to explain Dean's haphazard reinventions of himself as, alternately: an ersatz union rabble rouser, a centrist, a hard leftist, a born-again Christian and (I'm serious) a "metrosexual?" Next thing you know, he'll be telling everyone he's a pirate.
But this isn't the Internet or the high seas. This is national leadership and global politics. All the rolled-up shirtsleeves in the world can't change the fact that only a laughable 18 percent of Iowa Democrats thought that Dean was the man for the job.
It's entirely possible that the "Dean Revolution" is winding down, as more and more Americans are asking the question: "Who does this guy think he is?"
Eric Spratling is a Public Relations senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu.
