I’ve been telling people I see Dean is a Bartlet, and Aaron goes into detail. Yeah, like he said.
I’ve been waiting for the Dean moment to match the Bartlet “I screwed you on milk” one, but I haven’t found it yet (Aaron likes Dean’s straight talk about the draft). I’m also scared because I think it would mean incredible things about the improvement of our democracy if Dean were to win, but you can see from The West Wing how the Bartlet people went into the White House all idealistic and stuck up and how it completely backfired on them. You have to hope the Dean people are a little more gracious, a little more strategic, and a lot more political. At this point, they seem to be doing a good job.
The more I learn about Dean, the less I like him. Yes, I like that he’s politically savvy to the extent that he can, y’know, win an election. But he’s also proving to be more than usually malleable – his positions on a number of issues have changed, and it’s hard to pin him down on a straight answer a good deal of the time. So I’m pretty cautious about Dean – he gives off a great image, but I’m not entirely convinced that the image matches the man.
As for going into the White House all idealistic, you don’t have to look to TV – President Clinton was a BIG idealist (one of many great books to describe this is George Stephanopoulos’ All Too Human).