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When you watch a presidential election campaign up close, as I have for the last five months, you start to realize that the actual people running in the race are irrelevant to the results. Instead, the race is an exercise in corporate storytelling, in which the mass media?in a committee-like process that evolves over time through trial and error?settles on a storyline and then drags the rest of the country along for the ride, all the way through to November.
I had a front-row seat for this process. Though there were rumblings on the "angry" front before?most notably in a June piece by Matt Bai in the New York Times magazine that concluded by wondering aloud if Dean?s "angry message" might not be his downfall?the real launch of the "angry" theme came in the dual cover stories in Time and Newsweek that appeared simultaneously in early August.
Both Newsweek?s Jonathan Alter and Time?s Karen Tumulty?using language suspiciously similar to that of earlier Democratic Leadership Council memos about the burgeoning Dean disaster?focused heavily on the "anger" theme, openly concluding that the chief "problem" of Dean?s candidacy would be convincing voters to get past his "anger," "testiness" and "pugnacity."
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The Time-Newsweek covers came at a key moment in the Dean candidacy, just before Dean?s "Sleepless Summer Tour." This was Dean?s media coming-out party, in which he brought some three dozen or more prominent journalists around the country with him on a chartered plane and gave them all intimate access for four consecutive days.
I was on that plane, and I can report that the "angry" issue (as well as the "journalists hate Dean" issue) was something that was much discussed among the journalists. Mostly we thought it didn?t make too much sense. With us reporters on the plane, Dean was never anything but congenial and accommodating. And in his speeches and public appearances, he presented the full gamut of emotions. I think I speak for a lot of the reporters in saying that had I not just read the Fineman and Tumulty pieces, I would?nt have been aware that he was any angrier than any other candidate running for office. Christ, Dick Gephardt by comparison is a raving lunatic: waving his finger all the time and screeching, "Bush is a miserable failure!" with that creepy mask-like face of his. The only difference is, Gephardt?s speaking in front of 10 people.
Nonetheless, because of the Time-Newsweek stories, a large percentage of the reporters on the Dean plane felt that they had to at least address the "angry" issue. And so a great many of us talked about Dean having the reputation for an angry public style, and this focus frequently came at the expense of actually explaining to readers what Dean?s positions were.
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