At some point very soon the media is going to realize that it’s going “too far” with the Dean primal scream thing. In one sense I do think this hype is unfair. If you looked at it in a vacuum, I think most people would think it’s not really that big a deal. I’m sure he’s given that yell dozens of times before to his troops.

But, politics is all about context. Dan Quayle isn’t an idiot and he wasn’t immature, but he chose the wrong couple moments to seem too young and to get tongue-tied. I doubt that Al Gore was the most pompous liar in the history of politics, but in 2000 he didn’t make enough of an effort to avoid that image, so that’s the image that stuck. Sure, it’s unfair, but who said politics is fair? Look, if John Edwards had a horse-face, he’d still be a lawyer in North Carolina, and probably not nearly as successful as he has been thanks to his mug. Once the media — never mind the public — buys into a storyline about a particular candidate, that candidate is in real trouble. Dean surely knew that he was cultivating the image of an angry, bull-headed brawler. At precisely the moment he should have countered that image, he reinforced it.