If it’s hard to picture Howard Dean being elected president, it’s easier to understand why people like him.
The former Vermont governor’s rivals might have a better shot at defeating the presumptive front-runner for
the Democratic nomination if they figured it out. Unfortunately, most would also need science fiction special effects:
specifically, a time machine to transport them back to October 2002 to change their votes on war with Iraq, and
personality transplants to give them Dean’s feistiness. No matter what they said publicly, most congressional
Democrats pretty much believed what Australian journalist John Pilger caught Colin Powell admitting on videotape
about Saddam Hussein at a 2001 diplomatic conference: that while the Iraqi strongman was as nasty a specimen
as our species offers," He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.
He is unable to projcampsite on a fishing trip a while back. But not safe enough to go barefoot, thanks.

Meanwhile, we’ve got 130,000 American soldiers tooling around Iraq in Humvees that blow open like tuna fish cans.

Ten days after the huffy editorial, the Post’s front page reported that the U.S. "has backed away from several of its
more ambitious initiatives to transform Iraq’s economy, political system and security forces as attacks on U.S. troops
have escalated." Translation: Good-bye democracy, hello 2004 Bush campaign. No U.S.-approved constitution will be necessary.

"[I] deology," a "senior official" connect conventional power against his neighbors. "

Politically intimidated by the administration’s pre-election propaganda offensive, however, four of Dean’s five serious
opponents gave George W. Bush a blank check.

OK, maybe Weepin ’ Joe Lieberman and others bought into the massive self-delusion the administration used to justify
invading and occupying Iraq.

But still, the byword among establishment fided," has become subordinate to the schedule. "

Meanwhile, Bush was challenged by ABC’s Diane Sawyer about whether Saddam ever had " weapons of mass destruction"
capable of striking the U.S. "So what’s the difference?" he all but sneered.

Democrats, save that videotape.

For Dean, it’s a political double play. He not only gets credit among anti-war Democrats for being right about Iraq,
but Washington Democrats was that Bush was going to get his war anyway. Fear sells. Americans were still too hurt
and angry about 9/11 to distinguish between a religious zealot like Osama bin Laden and a secular tyrant like Saddam.
Arabs had struck the U.S.; Arabs were going to get hit back.

The smart play was to give Bush his war resolution, taking it off the table and turning the 2002 congressional elections
into a referendum on his terrible domestic record.

Well, we all know how that turned out. (I bought the argument at the time.) The point is that Dean didn’t merely insist upon
the folly of invading Iraq, he’s still holding firm. His apostasy recently drew a stern rebuke in a Washington Post editorial
tellingly titled, "Beyond the Mainstream." Only Dean, the newspaper complained, "omitted democracy from his goals for
Iraq and the Middle East. And only Mr. Dean made the extraordinary argument that the capture for talking back to
Washington’s insufferable punditocracy. (Reporters are leery of Dean, the Post’s Howard Kurtz writes, because he never
asks personal questions about them.) Resentment of the capital’s self-important" Heathers "(from the film satirizing high
school cliques) runs strong on Democrat-oriented Web sites.

So when Dean responds to his critics in the Democratic Leadership Council by teasing that they represent "the Republican
wing of the Democratic party," most aren’t offended, they’re amused. At last, a Democrat who gives as good as he gets.
New Englander or not, he doesn’t sound like Michael Dukakis; he sounds like Harry Truman.

And did the DLC get its little feelings hurt? Too bad. That most speak with Southern accents also helps Dean. Because another
thing many activist Democrats are sick of is the South. Warn them that a Democrat can’t win with no Southern electoral votes
and they say of Saddam Hussein ‘has not made Americans safer.’... The argument that this tyrant was not a danger to the
United States is not just unfounded but ludicrous."

Oh really?

Two days later, the White House announced a pre-Christmas "Orange Alert," warning that a terrorist attack worse than
9/11 might be coming. What these alerts mean with guys like Arkansas’ own Asa Hutchinson making the calls is anybody’s guess.

But are we safer with Saddam gone? Maybe in the sense that the Ozarks are safer after I killed that copperhead in my they’d
rather fight Bush in Ohio. Can it be done? In theory, yes. In practice, I think, no. Nor do I believe Dean can compete in the South.
But I explained the all-Yankee hypothesis to an Arkansas woman and lifelong Southerner. "You know what?" she said. "I’d love
to see Dean do it, then listen to the South whine about it for four years."
 
 

• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

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