NOW with Bill Moyers. Transcript. January 23, 2004 | PBS

MOYERS: So Howard Dean committed what pros say could be a terminal no-no. He got so hot under the collar in a cool medium that his campaign seemed to melt down right before our eyes.

Someone put his Monday night bombast to music and the cable channels and rightwing radio jocks are playing it over and over. Pundits and opponents hinted he came unhinged and is ”unfit for higher office.”

Even some faithful Democratic voters were shaken at the sight of a candidate sounding more like a pugilist than a President.

Horrified, the doctor’s gurus called in the cosmetic team who worked overnight on a full makeover: softer tones. More pastels. A touch more wonkery about healthcare. Dignity, Doctor, dignity on the media’s terms — even if to get it the other Dr. Dean, his wife, had to leave her examining room and patients to sit for an interview with Diane Sawyer.

The media want penitence, Doctor — penitence, served up with a dash of tact and deference — with cultural cool. I don’t know Howard Dean, have never met him. I don’t have a horse in this race. But I’ve been around long enough to know that on Monday night he did violate the 11th commandment of the medium-as-message: Thou shalt not be intemperate before a microphone. Unless, of course, you are intemperate on talk radio, or cable television, where fortune smiles on the bully and fame rewards excess.

A lot of people are gloating over Howard Dean’s foot-in-the-mouth disease. Among them, says Tina Brown in THE WASHINGTON POST, are establishment Democrats — the big-money guys — who are breathing easier now that Vermont’s Don Quixote has crashed his noble Rocinante into the windmill. With all that money raised from the internet rabble, with malcontents and idealists rallying to his side, with so much pent-up rage at a system that allows you to pick the public’s pockets as long as you do it with a smile and hurrah and good manners. Well, Howard Dean was just too unfashionably independent and unpredictable for comfort inside the Beltway.

The cameras caught him in flagrante politico, the unpardonable sin: daring to let go, losing it in the cause.

So the picture I’ll remember from the week is not of the candidate as raging bull, but this one: his subdued young followers, made suddenly aware of sudden death brought on by an overdose of spontaneity in an age where only the image counts.

mjh’s Blog: Think for Yourself

I’m so tired of the Media determining what is acceptable or not. Reporters have become critics….

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