Sacramento — Another hotel ballroom and, again, Howard Dean is at center stage.
The audience, hundreds strong, is rapturous, worshipful, hanging on every word like a life line tossed from the slightly elevated platform. Dean, who is running to become chairman of the national Democratic Party, speaks to the put-upon sentiment of every Californian in the crowd, promising to treat the state as more than a dispensary of cash to spend someplace else.
But that's not all. Democrats have to run to win in all 50 states, Dean continues, venturing into red-voting redoubts like Alabama, and Mississippi and Montana. His voice rises as Dean ticks off the states, and the crowd begins to clap, then cheer, then roar as it hits them. "AND MICHIGAN!"
Dean shouts, his voice suddenly turning to the shrieking, guttural growl that launched a thousand parodies. "AND SOUTH DAKOTA!"
The crowd is going wild and Dean is laughing right along, his eyes crinkled and his smile wide enough to show the crowns all the way in back. Finally, after nearly 30 seconds, the din begins to die and Dean ends his mock rant with a limp "yahoo," delivered deadpan, as if to say, "OK, is this better?"
Dean can laugh these days. Less than a year after his presidential campaign was left a heap of cinders, the former Vermont governor is the odds-on favorite to take over the Democratic Party and the job of Bush-basher-in-chief.
With Dean, of course, nothing is ever certain. He was once the heavy favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Heading into the Iowa caucuses, the kickoff of the 2004 campaign, his strategists identified 37,000 voters who said they definitely planned to back Dean.
He ended up with less than half that sum, a disappointment that sent his campaign reeling and launched the maniacal roll call of states -- "We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona.... YEEAAARRGGGHHH!!!!!" -- that sealed his collapse.
But enough people have demonstrated enough support of late that even skeptics have started coming around to the idea of Dean as Democratic Party chairman, grudgingly if not altogether enthusiastically. (One sure sign of his perceived strength is the refusal of most Dean critics to voice their doubts on the record, mindful they may need to curry favor sometime in the future.)
