With critics like these he can’t be all bad

The Washington Post’s Tina Brown knows New Yorkers. Or at least a certain kind of New Yorker — rich ones who read the magazine of the same name that she used to edit. Brown reports that this crowd could not be happier about “the ebbing of Howard Dean.” This is true even though Dean himself comes from a well-to-do Park Avenue type family. As Brown explains it, “Although Dean is a New York boy, he’d been giving New Yorkers a queasy bout of cognitive dissonance even before his ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ performance. It was his combination of patrician and pugilistic. We’ve had plenty of upper-class tribunes of the people, from FDR through John Lindsay and Bob Morgenthau, but calm assurance was always their thing, not vein-popping belligerence. A Park Avenue-type like Dean shouting hoarsely somehow doesn’t compute. It’s as if an up-from-the-streets, in-your-face pol like Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch were to start talking in elaborately polite murmurs.”
I don’t recall reading anything about Dean that made me feel as sympathetic towards him as this piece.

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