'I Think I Scared Them'

Dean agrees with my speculation that Washington insiders went all out to stop him once they realized he was the front-runner and he had no obligations to them.

"I think I scared them. I think it goes back to when Al Gore endorsed me, and AFSCME and the SEIU; people in the establishment began to think I could win," Dean says, recalling the heady days last fall when he accumulated endorsements from top Democrats and labor unions. "That scared the hell out of them because they knew I didn't owe anybody. I didn't owe them a dime. Eighty-nine percent of our money comes from small donors. That's certainly not true of anybody else running for president on either side."

The "them" Dean is referring to are the Washington-based political pundits, reporters and commentators who shape so much of the discussion of presidential politics on television and on the pages of America's elite newspapers. "I think the media is part of the established group in Washington. They have a little club there," says Dean. "If you don't go down to kiss the ring, they get upset by that. I don't play the game. I pretty much say what I think. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable."

Initially, Dean says, he felt he could take the hits. After all, media outlets that once dismissed him as the "asterisk" candidate from the small state of Vermont made him a national figure when they featured him on magazine covers and news shows.

But, after what he refers to as a "pep talk" given to backers after his defeat in the Iowa caucuses began airing around-the-clock on cable news programs as the "I Have a Scream" speech, Dean says he began to fully understand how events can be warped by the media. "ABC actually did a fairly sound retraction on that one," Dean says of a report by ABC News that showed the "scream" in Des Moines was dramatically amplified in television and cable reports. "But that's one network, and one report. Most of the networks failed to offer any perspective."

Dean dismisses the notion that proposals to break the grip of media conglomerates are radical. "That's not radical at all," he says. "That's what we used to have. The right wingers have undone that over the last 15 or 20 years, and we need to go back to what we had to have a sound democracy."

Dean also dismisses the notion that it would be difficult to get the American people to go along with a challenge to big media. "I think the public would love what I was doing," he says of a presidential assault on media monopolies. "The public doesn't particularly like the media, which works in my favor."