And so now, after months of tedious, tendentious argument, after riotous town meetings and the hysteria over non-existent death squads, after the Palin moment and the Lieberman moment, passage of historic legislation a hair’s breadth away, and here comes Howard Dean to say that the whole thing isn’t worth a damn thing. Bag it, says Governor Doctor Chairman Dean on every cable news program that will have him. Let’s start the whole thing over.
This raises an interesting question: is Howard Dean a comic figure or a tragic figure? Certainly it’s easy to see the comedy: imagine National Lampoon’s Washington Vacation, with Barack Obama in the role of Clark Griswold. Clark has, after hilariously strenuous effort, packed up the car, the kids, the dog, and is about to back out of the driveway when along comes the well-meaning neighbor Howard, to tell Clark how he’s packed the car all wrong, how he should have used a slipknot instead of a granny knot to tie up the bags, how putting the American Tourister on top of the wife’s overnight bag is going to squash everything, and how giving the kids a snack of pretzels is just going to make them thirsty and that’s eventually going to pay off in more time-wasting rest stops. And what makes him so
infuriating is that he’s right. Or rightish. Or only possibly right. Or he’s wrong, but now the wife has doubts.
So we have to say that Howard Dean is good for a laugh. But Dean is also a tragic figure, too, because he’s one of those seriously brilliant men with seriously limited political skills. These are men who always have an answer and who are positive not just of its correctness but of its absolute brilliance, and who cannot help themselves from letting you know that no answer is better than theirs. These are men (and I don’t know why, but we seem to get more versions of this man from New England than from anywhere else–Tsongas, Dukakis, Kerrey, Dean) who lack basic political intelligence. They cannot see that half a loaf is better than none, or that the best is the enemy of the good, or that you can accomplish a lot if you don’t mind who gets the credit.
Or that Rome wasn’t built in a day. None of the great federal programs arrived fully formed. They all had holes and contradictions, and they were all amended and expanded and modified and improved. Somehow that’s not good enough for the smartest guy in the room.
Want to know how dumb the smartest guy in the room is? Today on Morning Joe, he said that the administration should bag this proposal and start over. Imagine–the administration that has taken health care reform deeper though the process than any predecessor since Truman should bag it and start over. Scarborough doubted that the adminstration could go back to the issue. “Sure they will,” Dean said. “It’s a crisis.”
Yes, Mr. Governor Doctor Chairman, it’s a crisis. Which is why someone who is truly smart and not just egotistical would shut up and get with the program.
You a funny guy.