US Opinion Mark Steyn: I think we can all agree that Howard Dean, former Vermont governor and now, alas, former frontrunning Democratic presidential candidate, overreacted.
I'm not talking about his overreaction on Iowa caucus night a week ago, when he roared out the names of the remaining 49 states. I'm talking about his overreaction to his overreaction. Ever since last Monday's audition for An American Werewolf In Des Moines, the Vermonster has been in sleep mode.
"What I'm not is a rock star," he told ABC's Diane Sawyer, as she struggled to stay awake. No, indeed. He's turned into Perry Como. Not Perry Como sitting in a patterned sweater in a rocking chair singing Sleepy Time Gal. But Perry Como after some short-sighted elephant hunter has fired an extra-strength tranquilliser dart into his butt.
Sitting next to the Vermonster, for the first time ever on TV, was his wife, Dr Judith Steinberg. After being absent for months, all of a sudden she can't leave his side, just in case his medication wears off.
From my perch on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, having spent a decade watching Dean govern Vermont as a dull centrist, I've long argued that the crazy guy running around America this last year was just an act, a bit of canny opportunism from a minor local pol who needed to get himself a national profile in nothing flat.
And, for a while, it worked: he used the Internet and fired up hordes of young "Deaniacs", who flocked to Iowa to support him. Unfortunately, they seem to have put everybody else off voting for him, and Dean's simulated Mad How disease was so convincing he caught a touch of it himself.
The trouble is that he's now over-compensated. His minders have evidently told him it's not enough to go back to being the authentically boring Howard Dean; he's got to be mega-boring. Mad How now cowed. In his interview with Diane from Vermont's charmingly restored Norwich Inn, he seemed to be fading into the authentic colonial wainscoting. At Thursday's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, the calmer he got - "balanced budgets. fiscally conservative. manageable budgets. budgets in balance. fiscally conservative." - the more the bored Dean-watchers speculated that he was about to go berserk, like kids at the zoo eager to start lobbing pebbles at the slumbering gorilla. Not even Al Gore managed to be both crazy and comatose in the same week. The Governor seems to have come up with his own variation on the fiscally conservative/socially liberal shtick: vote for Dean - fiscally balanced, emotionally unbalanced.
None of the Vermonster's many enemies in the Democratic Party could have devised as exquisite a torture for Howard Dean as this last week. Whether they've solved their party's problem is another matter.
What seems to be happening on the ground in New Hampshire is this: now that Sen John Kerry is the sane alternative to Howard Dean, much of Gen Wesley Clark's support has leached away to Kerry. But at the same time Dean has been so subdued and demoralised that some of his wackier support has leached away to Clark. If Kerry is the sane alternative to Dean, Clark is the crazy alternative to Kerry.
Don't take my word for it, ask Michael Moore, the corpulent conspirazoid. He's endorsed Clark, not Dean.
In Thursday's debate, moderator Peter Jennings twice gave Gen Clark the opportunity to repudiate retrospectively Moore's characterisation of the President as a "deserter", as Clark had failed to do when Moore made the charge standing alongside him.
Instead, Clark claimed to have no views on the matter, not to have looked into it, and said that Moore is "not the only person who's said that".
Clark doesn't scream: he has the weirdly intense stare of the serial killer on the night bus. But, for as long as he's in the race, he'll do more damage to Democratic credibility than any amount of howling from Howard.
Consciously or otherwise, Democrats seem to be trying to neutralise the war as an issue - the overwhelming majority is still opposed to it but in Iowa they just wanted it to go away, so they could talk about their issues - health, education, mandatory bicycling helmets, etc.
That sounds fine in theory. But let's suppose it works, and the Dems nominate Kerry, whose argument is that, because he's a veteran, his plan to give Jacques Chirac a veto over American foreign policy sounds butcher than it would coming from a pacifist wussie.
Fine. But take away the war from Kerry and what's left? An old-school Massachusetts liberal. Kerry's record on domestic issues is well to the left of Dean's, and a much fatter target for Republicans. In brief, he's soft on drug pushers and murderers, big on tax hikes and partial-birth abortion.
If I were Bush and I had to choose between running against Howard Dean's Vermont or John Kerry's Massachusetts, I know which guy I'd be rooting for.