Howard Dean, at least since becoming a presidential candidate, has enjoyed an usual relationship with the national media. On the one hand, he doesn’t really like reporters or their questions, and has been known to get, shall we say, prickly when a journalist asks too forceful a question.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, reporters have, for most of the campaign so far, liked Dean. He’s prone to say something provocative without thinking it through first (which reporters know will make for better stories), he’s a fresh face that they’re not used to covering, and compared to the traditional DC-types they’re used to covering, he’s relatively entertaining. Best of all, his campaign has adopted a media-friendly style, keeping Dean pretty available.<\/p>\n
If you talk to staffers for many of Dean’s rivals, you’ll hear a lot of talk about the lack of scrutiny Dean receives. It may be partly sour grapes and partly jealousy, but I think the complaints have merit. Dean, for the most part, has received a free ride. To be sure, there have been a few tough interviews — the Meet the Press debacle<\/a> in June, for example — and the media has created a few mini-flaps over occasional controversies — the infamous Confederate flag comment comes to mind. On the whole, however, there hasn’t been a great deal of in-depth analysis of Dean’s governing record, policy proposals, or frequent rhetorical inconsistencies.<\/p>\n Indeed, as ABC News’ The Note mentioned in October<\/a>, Dean has worked his way into the frontrunner role “without getting anything like the normal level of scrutiny a leading candidate normally gets on issues as diverse as affirmative action, the death penalty, the assault weapons ban, tax cuts, the Social Security retirement age, veterans’ benefits, the legitimacy of using old ‘votes and quotes’ to attack an opponent, ethanol, matching funds, the war in Iraq, American troops in Iraq, NAFTA, Yucca Mountain, baseball, and others.”<\/p>\n Yesterday, however, it seemed like the gloves came off. Several writers and news outlets started treating Dean like a candidate likely to be the Democratic nominee for president. And, frankly, it wasn’t pretty. So much for the free ride.<\/p>\n The Post, however, was just the start. The LA Times, perhaps following up on John Kerry’s challenge<\/a> to the media last week, ran a story<\/a> scrutinizing Dean’s occasionally inconsistent approach to the war in Iraq. (The story raises many of the same points I raised last week.) The Times notes that Dean’s “off-the-cuff style has sometimes led him to take contradictory positions” and “has made conflicting statements about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and the conditions under which he would support going to war.”<\/p>\n Spinsanity, meanwhile, a respected non-partisan site devoted to analyzing political rhetoric, hammered Dean yesterday<\/a> on his inconsistencies on the war in Iraq, saying, “Dean has not lived up to his claims of honesty and candor” and concluding that his “pattern of misleading and contradictory remarks is damaging to Dean’s reputation.”<\/p>\n “While Dean frequently tells his supporters that they ‘have the power to take this country back,’ the power to set the record straight lies in his hands alone,” Spinsanity’s Brendan Nyhan wrote.<\/p>\n As if that weren’t enough bad news for Dean, The New Republic’s Jon Chait has started a new blog that will run exclusively at the magazine’s website. It’s called “Diary of a Dean-O-Phobe<\/a>.”<\/p>\n
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\nThe Washington Post, for example, ran a front-page item<\/a> about Dean’s “penchant for flippant and sometimes false statements,” which ran through a series of missteps that regular readers have probably seen here over the last few months. The paper also ran an unusually-harsh editorial<\/a> lambasting Dean’s approach to foreign policy, calling his positions “far from the mainstream,” “ludicrous,” and “hard to defend in a general election campaign.” Ultimately, the editorial condemns Dean’s “apparent readiness to shrink U.S. ambitions, in Iraq and elsewhere, at a time when the safety of Americans is very much at stake.”<\/p>\n