Rodney

This whole thing makes me want to spew. 'Cause it's just media bullshit. Also, some ignorance on the part of a lot of Americans who've never been to political rallies on the road, or to what used to be called "stump speeches" by political candidates.

In a stump speech, the candidate is on the road talking to a rally of true believers in some locality, and he tells 'em everything they want to hear. He fires 'em up, he gives 'em emotion, and generally acts way more frantic than he would in front of TV cameras. Stump speeches are as old as American politics -- they're called that because the traveling pol would usually stand on a stump to get a little height over the crowd. I saw President Ford give a stump speech to a bunch of senior citizens in a retirement community when he was running for reelection (sorta) in '76, and he was every bit as raucous as Dean was. I was sitting in the front row with the local press (no TV crews were there). I caught some spit on one hand. You get the picture.

But Jerry Ford never acted like that when the TV cameras were around, because while that sort of thing plays well live in front a crowd of supporters, on TV it makes you look like a crazy man. The pols discovered that in the early '50s, when political conventions were first televised. That's when politicians started to get boring.

Howard Dean's mistake, his only mistake, was making a stump speech with the cameras rolling. He's not weird, or crazy, or angry, or at least no more of those things than any other candidate. He just showed you what goes on when the broadcast media's not around. And gave you a very good example of why most pols are false and plastic and rehearsed on TV. Too risky to be others.