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News Gram™ February 2004

February 2004 ~ Vol. 10, No. 7

Regardless of your political leanings, Howard Dean's downward spiral teaches us a lot. It also serves to show us how much a little psychiatric understanding can help to illuminate as important a phenomenon as the political process.

By now, that single utterance, that primal scream of anticipatory euphoria and grim defeat, that tragi-comic explosion, has graced our front pages and prime-time news slots, has become fodder for Leno's barbs and entered our political lexicon in the form of eeeaauucchh! So it was that Howard Dean, dethroned from his lofty most-likely-to-succeed perch, concluded his Iowa campaign - and likely, his entire three-year effort to change his address to Pennsylvania Avenue. It is now but a matter of time before the former part-time governor either drops out of the race or is relegated to has-been status by the electorate.

What is not immediately clear is the reason for Dean's precipitous fall.

Going into Iowa, the seeming wunderkind emitted youthful, visionary, utopian vibes that would rock the foundations of the political order. The college kids were on board and so were their dollars. His campaign was rich. He was the deep anti-war candidate who seemed electric in his condemnation of the president's efforts in Iraq. He was real, someone you could relate to, a Kennedy type whose idealism seemed unsullied by the naysaying cynics on the right or the perennially unsatisfied negativists on the left. There was something real about Dean and the campus kids caught on to that part of him with a passion. Yes, there were a few tremors, some rattlings of weakness out there, but don't fret the small stuff, we could hear him say. We're on a roll to the White House and nothing, absolutely nothing can stop us. Nothing - except for the screech.

Should he make it into the history books, the starting point of his decline will not be those funny, hardly representative caucuses cooked up by the Iowans a long time ago. They don't convey all that much information. But they do put a candidate to the test. They offered him a chance to test his mettle, to deal with adversity in the public eye. And what did this candidate do?

He grabbed the mike, walked on stage, shouted about all his future victories and turned into a Mel Brooks parody of his expansive self. All those states out there - they'd fall in rapid succession to the power, charms and bucks of his campaign. One after another, he called them out. "We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We're going to California and Texas and New York!" he sputtered, walking, shaking and smiling. And then it came. Eeeaauucchh! A gruesome sally from the trenches of defeat. That singular "statement" was the beginning of Howard Dean's end.

What was it about this brief, expressive outburst that became the death knell of his campaign? Simply put, it was primitive, archaic and regressive. It was what terrifies all of us. There's a term for such a verbal eruption - limbic speech. Hardly speech at all, the term refers to speechlike expressions we find in infants, apes and monkeys. It turns out that the yapping and crying emanating from primates and newborns develops into a series of meaningful expressions that often signify danger, predators, hunger, and occasionally, delight.

Such signaling of primitive emotional states represents the earliest forms of language. It also embodies our most threatening fears - separation, death and dismemberment. Such a way of communicating requires no interpreter. It is a single language that unites all mankind. It is a language that will have served the downfall of Howard Dean's fight for the presidency.

The President of the United States is charged with protecting this country's citizens and of ensuring for them some semblance of domestic tranquility. FDR's pronouncement that "All we have to fear is fear itself" rang across the land like a joyous tocsin, telling each man, woman and child that we were safe, though burdened with a profound struggle. The Dean scream was the negation of just such reassurance. It resonated with the deepest fears of all who heard it leave his mouth. It told everyone that were he to become president, we would be besieged with dangers.

At another level, the screech informed us all that at some terrible, possible point in the future, when a murderous intrusion by some fanatic marauders again shook us straight to our marrow, he would fall apart. Rather than lead, he would disorganize and abandon us to our deepest anxieties.

There is a thanks we owe to Howard Dean. His candidacy is a testimony to the strength and success of the American electoral process. Without benefit of words, without eloquent promises of a glowing future and without the sloganeering that fatigues the ears, he communicated dramatically, succinctly and finally his unsuitability for the office he sought.

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