New Hampshire is tomorrow and I'm interested to see if William Saletan, writing in Slate is right about this:

Dean makes light of his concession speech on caucus night in Iowa, in which he vented his emotions with a visceral roar. In the week since then, he has repeatedly explained that he wasn't trying to scare the television audience; he was just trying to mirror and affirm the enthusiasm of his supporters who were in that room in Iowa.

But that's the problem. Dean wasn't talking to the country. He was talking to his movement.

You could argue that Dean's Iowa yelp shouldn't be more of an issue than Bush's non-stop idiotic statements. And certainly Bush himself speaks to the echo chamber as Saletan here accuses Dean of doing.

It's frustrating to me that I look on Kerry with such despair. "What a dullard!" I think, faulting Kerry for not stirring my passions. Even though that is the same argument used by those who voted against Dukakis, against Gore (and to a lesser extent against Mondale and against Carter who had other circumstances besides their utter dullness as politicians).

But Kerry is dreadful. It's impossible for me to imagine anyone voting FOR Kerry rather than simply against Bush. I will, of course, vote for anyone who is running in opposition to Bush and there is a decent number of folks in this country who would rather drink a glass of pee than vote for our current, cretinous president.

But there are lots of people who aren't hard core Democrat or hard core Republican (or on the fence like those of us who briefly thought "gee, I guess I could consider voting for John McCain if it came down to it")

I once heard Deborah Tannen speaking about difficulties in conversational style. She described speaking with an executive for a movie studio who spent his days hearing pitches from fillmmakers. He said that he hears brief, short pitches and there are tens of millions of dollars on the line each time. The exec said that, essentially, he gives the nod to filmmakers who are super-enthusiastic. He doesn't research their ideas, test them, none of that. He picks whoever is the most enthusiastic.

Which is not as retarded as it first sounds. Making a movie (or, you know, running a big-ass nation) is going to have heaps of difficulties which cannot be foreseen. Is the person at the helm excited about this endeavor, eager to see it through? Or resigned and pragmatic, throwing his hands up and saying "well what was I SUPPOSED to do?"

And indeed, someone who would like to pay full attention, yet has lots of other stuff to attend to, how should this person assess fitness for this mammoth project? Well, Seeming Psyched is a decent stand in. It's not perfect, it no doubt excludes a lot of competent people but it probably doesn't INCLUDE too many incompetents.

Except, of course, for the current president. But you can see how somebody might have chosen him over the godawful Al Gore.