Base Anger - Why Howard Dean is leading the Democratic pack.

Highly interesting comments from the neo-con organ. I'll let you decide what organ. ;-)

BY EARLY SPRING, journalists and political activists had begun to notice that former Vermont governor Howard Dean had a knack for firing up crowds. He was little known and badly financed, but his issues were unfudged and easy to understand: budget-balancing, civil unions for gays, a middle-of-the-road states-rights position on guns, and implacable opposition to the war in Iraq. Tying them all together was a hostility to George W. Bush that bordered on loathing. Dean has called the Bush administration a collection of "right-wing wackos," and last week, at a meeting on a New Hampshire lawn, he bluntly described the president's promise to unite Americans as "a lie."

Only in the last month has the general public remarked on Dean's rise. Democrats admire his candor. He's within two points of John Kerry in the latest University of New Hampshire poll on the primary there, taken in early July. In mid-month, one New Hampshire Republican who is considering a statewide bid polled a small sample of Democrats and Independents and found Dean at 30 percent, Kerry at 26 percent, and the others clustered in single digits.

Watching Dean pile up support is like watching Albert Pujols go after baseball's Triple Crown: He's not at the top of every category, but he's the only guy within striking distance of winning each one. Dean could conceivably win Iowa, which Kerry cannot; he could conceivably win New Hampshire, which Dick Gephardt cannot. If Dean wins Iowa, Gephardt's presidential hopes are finished; if Dean wins New Hampshire, Kerry's are badly wounded. People are beginning to speak of a "two-tier" race in New Hampshire and Iowa, with Dean joining Kerry and (to be charitable) Gephardt in tier one. But even that may underestimate Dean's strength. It's more accurate to say the race has become Howard Dean versus a half-dozen blow-dried shills for an intellectually exhausted party who are now, as one New Hampshire newspaper put it, "scurrying around New Hampshire--boring people."

Dean has one overriding strength, and that strength is always in the news. The key to Dean's electoral hopes is George W. Bush. New Republic journalist Jonathan Cohn is one of the few to have stated as much with an appropriate baldness. "If Dean isn't really so liberal," Cohn asked in a recent article, "why do so many liberals love him? A big reason is that he seems as angry as they are." Dean has convinced Democratic voters that he is simply madder at the president than his rivals are--and less capable of doing business with the forces Bush represents. That is the real nature of his extremism. Some Democrats worry--Cohn's New Republic colleague Jonathan Chait, for instance--that Dean will paint himself into a corner by automatically taking the position diametrically opposed to the president's. That may indeed limit Dean's flexibility and cause him trouble in the general election. But the Democratic nominee will be chosen by a base that demands nothing less.

As for the general election, Republicans seem unaware of how riled up Democratic activists remain, even three years after the 2000 elections. A substantial segment of the party's base has been radicalized to the point where it does not recognize the legitimacy of the Bush presidency. This is a very different thing than mere dislike of a president. It means that Democrats are prepared to fight this election as if they were struggling to overthrow a tyrant. One fears that 2004 could wind up--in its rhetoric and its electoral ethics--as the dirtiest general election campaign in living memory. It is not a condemnation of Dean to say that his rise provides another piece of evidence that this fear is well founded.