Psychoanalyzing the Democratic National Committee

Walter Shapiro, on the Kos site:

"The DNC isn't afraid that Dean will lose 47 states; they're afraid that he won't return their calls."

There's MUCH about Shapiro's off-hand but penetrating comment here that rings absolutely true. Watching the Democratic establishment do their best (covert) work to sink Howard Dean as a dangerous (gulp!) OUTSIDER has had me stirred up enough to begin unsubscribing myself from Terry McAuliffe's email fundraising machine. Instead of seeing Dean's phenomenal ability to bring new Democrat activists into the public square as a plus for a faltering party ("faltering"? try "prostrate," when 16 Democratic Senators join the Repukes in cutting off debate to give President Bush his grotesque budget request last week, along with his curtailment of overtime pay) ... instead of celebrating what Dean has done to bring hope and optimism back to a wide swath of disenfranchised and disaffected non-voters, they put the DNC national spokesman James Carville on CNN writing Dean off at every opportunity.

They want Clark, and I liked Clark back when he was flirting with running and not actually doing it. But it took him too long to decide, and he doesn't come across on TV the way he'll have to come across to win.

Not that I'm a Deaniac. I'm just incensed that this taciturn doctor from Vermont, a fiscal conservative with a sterling record and a good heart, has been caricatured unmercifully and that at least some of the people in the DNC have gleefully participated in that process.

But who knows what Tuesday will bring. Frankly, a second-place finish for Dean in New Hampshire ought to be celebrated as an amazing come-back, considering the across-the-board writing-off of his candidacy that has completely dominated the media for a week. Not a single Sunday Morning Gasbag this a.m. thought he could or would recover. Gawd! I'd like to see them eat those words (not that they ever would show the slightest hint of a conscience nor humility). And there are indicators out there that the voting public might yet stick it to the media whores for trying to take a good, honest man down. This ain't over.