Howard Dean as Democratic National Committee chairman went through that modern baptism of fire known as a sit down interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday, drawing mixed reviews.
He touched on a wide variety of topics, and you can read the full transcript yourself by clicking on the link above.
How did he do? It seemingly depends, first of all, on whether you like and agree with Howard Dean to begin with. But some video snippets will help you decide.
The video site Crooks and Liars (which is also a great site for its short commentaries on news events) as usual gives an excellent high-quality chunk of video. It shows Dean answsering quite nimbly and effectively on several issues. We say “effectively’ from the standpoint of politics, not necessarily because of his stands on issues.
Trey Jackson offers an excellent excerpt as well, but he sees the appeance a totally different way. He particularly points his readers to a Dean blooper and includes the Dean suggestion that Tom DeLay (who no one can say this site has defended) should go back to Texas and serve his jail time when, as Russert points out (a)DeLay hasn’t been convicted of anything yet so he has no jail time to serve, (b)Dean had argued during the campaign that the U.S. should not pre-judge Osama bin Laden.
And those are indeed valid points to note — so Mr. Dean might want to remove one slice of red meat from his plate when he talks to the faithful on the stump, in the interest of accuracy and consistency.
Aside from that major bump in his performance, if you look these two videos, Dean did quite well. Now the question is whether he can raise $$$ for the Democratic party. Robert Novak (who is admittedly hardly an unbiased source of news) recently noted that the Demmies have raised half what the GOPers did during the same period. That’s called the “bottom line” — more important than Meet The Press appearances. So the jury is still out on the Dean chairmanship.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.