After seeing Dean poke fun at himself on Letterman’s Top Ten list last night, I was willing to give Dean a pass for his histrionics Monday night, and suggest that the jokes about him are becoming a little unfair. But then I read this piece by MSNBC’s Howard Fineman, which begins:
Like the Challenger explosion, the faltering of Howard Dean’s campaign will occupy crash-site investigators for years, maybe decades. How did a guy who rose to front-runner with such a powerful message — the war is wrong, the political system needs profound reform — get so sidetracked between Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl?
The analogy to the Challenger explosion is appropriate. It looks like Dean, too, tends to implode when things get cold. Worse than that, Iowa doesn’t look like a fluke; Dean appears to have a fundamental design flaw — the guy just seems to be lacking an O-ring or two.