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I already posted my views on this in a less-serious thread. But to summarize: what Dean did was give an old-fashioned political stump speech, a rouse-the-troops speech, for the cameras. This was a mistake because stump speeches are great if you're in the room -- it's just a pep rally -- but they look crazy on camera. Politicians stopped doing them on the TV in the early '50s for that reason; that's when pols started getting boring. Better boring than upsetting.
But they still do them when the camera's not around, or at least they did. I attended a stump speech Pres. Ford gave back in '76 to a group of well-off retirees (no televised press there), and he was so fired up that some of his spit hit the front row (and me). But he never did that on TV -- he knew better. Howard Dean made an error in judgment, but he's no weirder than the rest of them.
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