Hysterical.

Hopefully I wasn't just wishing it to be, but I'm a harsh critic. Eighty percent of the time when I want something to be good I hate it. (Take Dean's book, for instance. I could only bear four pages.)

First, Letterman illustrated the power of understatment, in his intro of the speech: "It just got to be a little, you know . . unusual." (That didn't play in print, did it? All in the delivery. He paused and stressed the last word, not too much.)

Dean seemed to have a great time with it, and was genuinely funny much of the time.

The list:

"Ways, I, Howard Dean, can turn things around":

10. Switch to decaf.

9. Unveil new slogan, "Vote for Dean and get one dollar off your next purchase at Blimpie."

8. Marry Rachel on the final episode of "Friends."

7. Don't change a thing, it's going great.

6. Show a little more skin.

5. Go on "American Idol" and give them a taste of those pipes.

4. Start working out and speaking with an Austrian accent.

3. I can't give specifics yet, but it involves Ted Danson.

2. Fire the staffer who suggested I do this lousy Top 10 List instead of actually campaigning.

1. Oh, I don't know — maybe fewer, crazy, red-faced rants.

Loved #10, right off the mark. Delivered perfectly deadpan. And #4, his best delivery, flinging back his suit jacket for just a sec with just the right smirk.

Don't know how much it will help, but it will prolly help a little and I sure did enjoy it. Enjoyed the whole damn Night of Howard. Did you?

I get that Howard Dean freaked a lot of people out Monday night. I didn't see it that way at first because I saw it in context in the room, and apparently even Tucker Carlson admitted he thought it seemed normal when he first saw it there. The problem is that it was broadcast way beyond the room, and I get that for those of you not in the room it was weird and goofy, over the top and unpresidential.

I get all that, and it was a terrible miscalculation on his part.

And the media has every right to report that, though I think they have gone over the top in repeating it, and it's kind of sad how superficial they are. It's all about image for our media--they would much rather capture one moment of goofiness and obsess over it than actually talk about how the president should be running the country.

All of that, though, I can understand. But here's the big load of pure crap:

Check out this sentence from the lead story on the front page of today's USAToday:

Dean placed a disappointing third in Iowa and then reinforced the perception that he is the "angry" candidate with a frenzied speech to supporters.

[Note: the quotation marks are theirs.]

Look at the crafty sleight of hand there:

The press has been trying to pin this "angry" label on Dean for months, with largely impotent results. It did start to stick in Iowa the final week when things got really ugly and he did seem to lose his temper a bit. (I know this, because I talked to a lot of Iowa voters this weekend who repeated it.) It stuck then in that small but pivotal state at just the wrong moment, but otherwise, the press has been pretty frustrated in the public's rejection of their idiotic angry label.

But they've got the goods on him now. Over and over the clip has been played, and this time the public is buying. The whole country is enjoying laughing at him, so this time he's caught redhanded. This point was not unique to the USAToday piece--I have been hearing it over and over again in the media all week. Dean proved he was angry and everybody agrees, so now it's finally an accepted fact.

Right?

Wroooooooong.

How in the hell are they equating frenzied and angry? How the hell did that horrible newsmodel Diane Sawyer make exactly the same link in her interview tonight when she said:

And, some of the political analysts have said that the real problem is that [the speech] tapped into another concern, it seemed to re-enforce the concern that had been brought up before about your pressure gauge. And, how you control it. And, specifically the whole issue of temper.  

The transcript shows nine times she used the word temper. And as she admits, she's just parroting the standard line that "political analysts" have been repeating all week. The whacko speech reinforced the image--notice she says RE-inforced, as if most of the populace already had that image of a bad temper.

Temper? Angry? I have heard that speech ridiculed a hundred times since Monday, but virtually no one has ever called it angry or hot-tempered. And I have stopped people who were ridiculing it and asked if they thought it was angry, and the reaction was always befuddlement: "Angry? No, not angry, just weird. Really weird." Or whacko, unseemly, whatever.  Definitely not angry.

The press caught him doing something completely different than angry, yet they are running around presenting it as the final evidence that he is fact what they have been claiming all along: angry. They just slip it in there so effortlessly, as if the premise supports the conclusion--apparently the words share bad enough connotations, viewers/readers/listeners skip right on over the distinction. The monumental distinction. Whackiness has nothing to do with anger whatsoever, aside from both being undesirable.

What is the matter with these newsmodels? Surely they see the yawning hole in their logic. Are they that willing to be that dishonest just because they think we're too stupid to accept their angry characterization so they have to con us into it?

I'm watching her with that horrible Diane Sawyer right now, and I just can't believe this woman.

Incredibly bright, but more importantly, one of the most sincere people I've ever seen.

That woman is golden!

Well, Dean started out spectacular tonight, but he dipped down somewhat from there.

Several questions now he has stumbled a bit getting where he wanted. He needs a better answer for some stupid questions dufi like Britt Hume will throw at him. A few of them, he started slowly, cast about, figured it out and ended very strongly, but could have been a lot better.

By comparison, though, he's doing great.

---

It's over now, and here is my final scorecard, in order of performance:

• Sharpton: Right on the mark much of the time, best one-liners and pleasant surprises, as usual. Hands down the best debater.
• Dean: Fair to good most of the time, spectacular at times. Most trenchant, incisive statements illustrating why he should be president.
• Clark: Great now and then, very good sometimes, but some real problems now and then.

huge drop here:

• Lieb: Insufferable, but a few really great suprises.
• Edwards: Pretty bland most of the time. One hot moment.
• Kerry: Utter blandness. Most improved by far, all the way up to last place.

• Kucinich: Who cares?

Eighty minutes in to the debate and not a single catfight.

They're all behaving themselves.

(Although Lieb got a little incensed at Howard saying the senators were wrong to vote against the war, the questioner specifically asked Howard if he stood behind his comments on that, so he was forced to address it, and did it in about the least inflamatory way possible. That was the closest to a fight. No one has gone after anyone.)

A little curious, though not completely surprising.

No one wants to get the negative label after Edwards scored so big just for being nice?

No one sure who to aim their fire at, except for Dean who has to take down Kerry, but absolutely, positively has to come off unangry?

Wow. Lieb gave a good answer.

His faith thing started off scaring me, but I ended up liking what he said. If Dems don't learn to speak the language of religious people, they give away the whole internal issue of morality--which ought to be a Dem issue. What party would Jesus be? A Democrat, no doubt about it. Yet the Rs act like they're the ones. Incredible. Christianity is supposed to be about compassion, helping others, telling the truth . . .

These are Dem values. Dems ought to be winning the churches.

But that's a whole nother story.

And Lieb still disgusts me.

Dean just defused the Monday-night hooting beautifully, saying he acted a little silly, but he's serious about the things he believes in, and he stands up for unpopular positions--like the awful No Child Left Behind before it became fashionable to bash it, and . . .

. . . and standing up for gays and lesbians! 

He stood up for gays and lesbians without being asked! I don't EVER remember ANYone bringing that subject up when they weren't boxed into it--except of course, when they were taking the opportunity to bash us.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

That's the Howard we love.

He's smiling--believably, affably--he's agreeable, he's insightful, he's cutting right to the heart of each issue, he's hitting every mark.

It is a new Howard. It's the old Howard, it's the Howard we fell in love with and then wandered away. He's back and he's better than ever.

And I love him even more.

God, what a wet dream to get a guy like this for president. Is it really so much to ask?

Great opening by Dean. Thank God.

Laid it all on the line in the starkest terms I can remember any politician stating his case.

Incredible tag line: "There was no middle class tax cut."

If New Hampshire voters can look past all the hoopla and just consider what it is they really want, I think they can still fall in love with this guy.

Or am I just projecting.

(Clark had a great opening, too, though nothing on the level of Dean's. His: I'm a Democrat now, and I can attract a lot of people to the Democratic party was pretty powerful. That boy is still my fallback.)

Wow, Kerry is not acting like such a windbag. I think I missed his first response, but on the second one, he ditched all the bullshit language and equivocation. Still rambled into minutae and put me to sleep a little, but he's ten times better than I last listened to him, which was a few months ago.

I'm ready to lay money that one of the following will be true:

• Tonight will go down in history as the night Dean turned his campaign around and the key moment in his nomination fight, or
•  This past Monday will go down in a much smaller footnote to history as the night he lost it.

If he's going to turn it around, this will be the night.

The one and only New Hampshire debate will be critical. It starts at 8 eastern, with an hour of extended clips on Niteline.

But with bigger ratings, much more air time and a much better format to convey his personality, the interview with that horrible newsmodel Diane Sawyer on Primetime may be more important. It starts at 10 eastern/pacific. And his wife Judy will be there with him, hopefully fleshing out Dean, the character.

Finally, it's David Letterman a few hours later, on CBS. If he shows the right kind of humor, maybe there will be a clip to compete with The Scream. It will never get one-tenth the airplay of the scream, but if it's funny enough, it will get a great deal.

I sure hope he's in good form today. Rough time to get a cold, but he'll have to figure out a way to overcome that.

Good luck, Doctor Dean. It's all riding on tonight. Either you'll reverse the slide or accelarate it. I've still got faith you can do the former.

I did something I'm slightly ashamed of Tuesday morning. I disowned him for a few minutes.

The alarm went off at 7, four hours after we set it. Barely enough time to sprint for the airport without a shower, fourth night in a row of way too little sleep.

I was still numb from the stunning "loss." Distant third sure felt like a loss, though it was a lot better than fourth for a homeboy--at least it wasn't our guy headed back to Missouri to bow out. I still hadn't cry--still haven't actually--never did figure out quite how to mourn it. I didn't watch the returns the way I normally do, I was still driving back from the disaster up in Ankeny I had seen start to unfold as a dozen different caucuses began inside one big high school and I ran frantically from room to room trying to salvage something with worthless posters, already aware that we were about to get crushed up there.

So it crept up on me in a weird way, with a bad taste, knowing it didn't have to be that way.

All Monday night, I felt numb. Couldn't really sort out anything. Saw my new friends at the party, and they had the same pained expressions--not that Dean lost so much as we knew why he lost. We had raised a huge team and had no idea what to do with it. We had focused on all the wrong factors. (Like the media, stupid. Like our man's image on TV. Like precinct captains. Like . . . )

We weren't just dissappointed, we were pissed.

So Tuesday morning, I got up in a fog, I picked up my jacket on the way out of the hotel room and quietly peeled off the big blue DEAN for America sticker with the bright pink triangle nestled between the e and a.

I had no intention of disowning him, I just didn't want to own him right that moment. The hotel was packed with politicos, the airport would be swarming with them, I just didn't want to take their ribbing for a few hours, I didn't want to hear their snickers, I just didn't want to carry that weight again for a little while. I had set my own identity aside for a long weekend, announced myself in every way to every human being I contacted as A DEANIAC! I'M A DEANIAC! CAN I GET YOU TO TALK ABOUT HOWARD DEAN?

Enough. I was tired of shouting it out from my jacket and T-shirt and I was kinda tired I was announcing I was a homo, too.

I was tired and weary, and I could be a Howard Dean supporter in the afternoon. Just give me an hour or two to recover, OK.

I kinda didn't want to, but I reminded myself it didn't matter. Iowa was over, we were on our way out, nothing but other politicos at the airport, who the hell cares what they think.

I saw a lot of stickers at the airport--on the humans, on their luggage, on their belongings--but they were mostly Kerry and Edwards stickers that morning, in stark contrast to the Dean and Gephart logos I had been watching all weekend. Figures. Easy to be them that morning.

Half an hour into the security line from hell, after we had finally made it to the escalator, only to enter a final cattle (chattel?), I rounded a turn and saw one of our ranking Dean staff members, the one heading up much of the gay effort nationally. She smiled, asked how I was doing, and she had on a Dean sticker. Not a gay one, but at least a Dean one.

I felt so ashamed. If ever there was a time to demonstrate we were not beaten, it was here and now. It wasn't just politicos, it was just as many press men and women, and it was obvious the Kerrys and the Edwards were walking proud and ready to return to battle. The Big Dean Army was suddenly almost entirely MIA.

So I reached into my pocket and pulled out two rolls. I was so sick of those things. We had unravelled the huge rolls into smaller rolls of 25, and I had packed my pants pockets with so many I walked funny and foisted them upon anyone I could find. Waitresses, baristas, random passersby . . . But suddenly I was happy to see them again. Especially the gay ones. I had never seen a presidential candidate button with a big pink triangle before, much less rolls and rolls of thousands of them, announcing his support to stand behind the rights of people like me.

I slapped one on my coat breast. Felt good to be a Deaniac again.

We were all rushing to make the gate once we got through security, so I whipped my coat off and packed in the overhead without a thought. I sat down in my middle seat, settled in and realized I was de-Deaned again. I asked my friend to get up. Pulled my coat down, got out the roll again. Sat down, unpeeled it, and pressed it back onto my shirt breast.

The window-seat guy couldn't help noticing.

"Are you on the Dean staff?"

"I'm just a volunteer."

"Really. How do you feel . . ."

He turned out to be Kevin Anderson from the BBC, and I had one of the most rewarding plane conversations of my entire life.