Politics: The Point Behind Dean

David Shribman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes an interesting point that Howard Dean may be surging in the polls and taking over the conventional wisdom's frontrunner position in the Democratic race for president precisely because he's actually talking about things, instead of talking about nothing, or trying to rhyme, or whatever.

Shribman starts by pointing out Dean's rising poll numbers, then:

You don't need to delve into the messy statistical innards of poll results to figure this out. The country is basically split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Half the country is skeptical of the president's performance. Since Republicans are politically inclined to sympathize with Bush's assumptions and policies and temperamentally inclined to stand by their man anyway, it stands to reason that the dissent is coming from the Democrats.

Easy conclusion (though not so easy that all the presidential candidates haven't drawn it yet): Beating up on the president is really, really good politics if you're a Democrat and if you're running for the White House.

Dean was the first to figure this out and remains the most artful in carrying it out. The political establishment is having a grand time plotting the trajectory of Dean's progress, as if he were a tropical storm bearing down on Bermuda, and the current meteorology suggests that, now that Hurricane Dean has made landfall, he is veering right. Maybe he is, maybe he's not. It doesn't matter. He hasn't lost sight of the main game in the surprisingly narrow world of primary politics, which this year turns out to be making an issue of taking issue with Bush.

Then he concludes with what I, as a voter, have been praying for since I started watching the news:

No fluff in Dean. No black-and-red checkered shirt, no peanut brigade, no tales from Project Mercury, no rhyming couplets about self-esteem. And that just might be the point behind his rise. Dean benefits subliminally, perhaps, from the doctor bit, and he may get a bounce from Vermont's reputation as a flinty, plain-spoken mountainous redoubt on the frosty frontier hard by Quebec. But mostly it is what he says that has made the difference. In 2004, that rarest of political years, the premium might be on the political, not the personal. Miracles do happen.

Indeed.