- Personally, I didn’t find anything all that offbeat about Howard Dean’s “To New Hampshire — and Beyond!” speech Monday night. I know a lot of anti-Dean folk found it so over-the-top that bits and pieces of it (particularly the final primal scream) showed up as MP3 files all over the Net Tuesday — but to me it was a just a rousing chorus of defiance-in-defeat by a guy who clearly needs a voice teacher to keep him from going mute in the next week or two.
I mean, if you want to make fun of Dean or portray him as a maniac, there’s plenty of other material to do it with. Overreaching doesn’t help your point.
- Yes, it’s usually used as a political speech, and, yes, it’s an election year, so it’s even more political than usual. But at least the State of the Union is a Constitutionally-mandated event (even though giving it in person, as a speech to Congress, was not the initial tradition), by the elected President, and so warrents a certain degree of media coverage.
The Opposition Response is neither mandated nor equivalent. It’s just political grandstanding, a lengthy “Oh, yeah?” that we don’t really need to give equal stature to. I didn’t care for the “political equivalency” feel to it during the Clinton years, and I still don’t care for it now. The Senate or House minority leadership, or the up-and-coming political star of the opposition party, does not have the same standing as the President, and turning the SotU into a formalized Point-Counterpoint just feels tacky to me. Save it for the 11 o’clock news, or the Op-Ed the next day.
That is all. Go back to work.
I saw both Dean’s and Gephardt’s speeches live. They were only a few minutes apart. Gephardt vowed to continue to fight for the little guy even though he was defeated. He also expressed relief that he could now spend more time with his family. In my opinion, it was the best expression of “family values” I have seen from a politician in a long time. This class act juxtaposed with the Dean speech just made Dean look even sillier.
The response to the State of the Union predates the Clinton Administration and the current one does not mark the nadir of this “art form”. That award goes to Speaker Jim Wright who with shifty eyes stated, “We just want to help the President.” Yeah, right.
For a funny remix of the speech check this out.
Oh, I know the “Democratic/Republican Response” thang predates Clinton. It was during that time that I started becoming more irked by it, as it started to get the attention and perceived gravitas of the SotU itself.
On the Media did a bit [link requires RealPlayer] on the Dean speech this weekend (opening with a remix attributed to “blogger James Lilek”), in which the dean scream was compared to the Wilhelm, with both clips played side by each, for easy comparison.
The similarity between the two screams had occured to me.