Dean Week seems so long ago. History. As they say, a week is a long time in politics. Saddam’s capture eclipses everything. Or does it? David Tell gets the real impetus for the Dean attraction in a piece in the Weekly Standard. The piece is ostensibly on ‘Gephardt’s Last Stand,’ but it shows Dean voters as people who’re hostile to regular folks. Dean voters seem to be motivated by…well, it’s not clear: ‘A 24-year-old Dean field organizer, who ‘broke into tears several times while trying to explain’ the point, tells freelancer Samantha M. Shapiro that for her, ‘the thought that he’ll be president is a side effect. This campaign is about allowing people to come together to tell their life stories.”
Gephardt voters are older and relatively sane: ‘It’s a fairly safe guess that no one in Iowa is backing Richard Gephardt for president because otherwise he’d be lying half-naked in a fetal position mourning a lost girlfriend.’ The capture of Saddam won’t affect the ardor of The Jerk’s followers. The real impetus of Dean’s campaign is anger — and Bush hatred. T. R. Reid has a report on a Dean gathering in Iowa in today’s Post. It opens with a woman who gets a pain in her spine every time she hears George Bush’s name. Is there a doctor in the house? The gathering seems to have taken place on Friday, before the capture. I doubt if finding the tyrant in a hole has had any impact on the psyche of the Dean voter.