"Tomorrow he'll be yesterday's man"
Mark Steyn's post-mortem of the Dean campaign consists mostly of Steyn's writings from the early days of Dean's candidacy. This was Steyn's take on July 5, 2003:
"Dean is a not quite telegenic guy: he’s got clean-cut looks, but his jaw is squashed back into his neck, like a plastic doll whose owner’s tricycle reversed over him. It gives him a vaguely defensive air. Vermonters don’t make a big deal of their governors – there is no “governor’s mansion”, for example – so Dean made a big deal of himself. When you run into him at, say, the annual World’s Fair in Tunbridge or on the last flight back to Vermont from the big cities to the south, he gives off a whiff of thin-skinned arrogance not uncommon in the medical profession. He’s chippy with a mean streak. So’s John McCain, but he took the precaution of conscripting the entire national media as campaign workers. If I were a Dean consultant, I’d be urging him to do the same, fast."
But Steyn was not a Dean consultant, so "when Dean ran into trouble in Iowa, the media couldn't wait to put him a cement overcoat and lower him into the river. And, when he was forced to rein in the 'mean streak' after Iowa, he became a heavily sedated bore."
Steyn also predicted in July that the legacy of Dean's campaign would be to have pulled the party to the left of where it wants to be. Dean basically said the same thing today in his parting statement.
