Look Back in Anger

Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas has a new column at the Guardian that takes an interesting look at how the Right's portrayals of "angry" Dems are coming back to bite Furious George in his angry ass.

Kos recalls the casting of Howard Dean and Al Gore:

Bush's political operators have worked overtime to make "angry" a pejorative term this political cycle. They wielded the "too angry" attack against Howard Dean in the primaries, when it seemed Dean would be the Democratic nominee, and it helped destroy Dean's candidacy. Republicans again shouted "too angry" to discredit Al Gore's series of impassioned anti-Bush speeches earlier this year.

The "too angry" claims successfully marginalized the content of those speeches - blistering indictments of an incompetent administration.

What Kos fails to explicitly mention is that once the Bushies had successfully tagged Dean and Gore as angry, Part Two of their plan went into motion. The anger was indicative of something even worse, according to the Right. Dean and Gore weren't just angry; they were off balance.

Here's Joseph Farah from the always-reliable WorldNetDaily in an article titled "Gore mentally unstable":

Had the Constitution called for direct election of the president of the United States, a clearly mentally unstable man would be sitting in the Oval Office right now.

That's my conclusion after watching, listening to and reading Al Gore's speech to the Moveon.org-New York University crowd this week.

The man is unhinged. He's deranged. He's unbalanced. He had better get out of New York as quickly as he can because, as Ralph Kramden would say, "Bellevue is calling."...

Somebody get this guy a sedative. I really believe he needs medical and psychiatric help. Throw a net over this man before he does any further harm to this nation.

The talking heads at Fox News, the radio personalities, and all the other usual suspects did their parts in creating the "Al Gore is crazy" echo chamber, rhetorically asking if he "has gone off his meds" and consistently associating his "anger" with the possibility that he had lost his mind. (A comprehensive collection can be found at Media Matters here.)

Howard Dean was also castigated for being somehow touched in the head, with articles like "Conservative leader calls Dean too 'mentally unstable' to be president" popping up and his temperament becoming useful fodder for late-night television:

"Cows in Iowa are afraid of getting mad Dean disease....It's always a bad sign when at the end of your speech, your aide is shooting you with a tranquilizer gun." - Jay Leno

"Dean is a doctor, but he acts more like a postal worker." - Jay Leno

"Did you see Howard Dean ranting and raving? Here's a little tip Howard - cut back on the Red Bull." - David Letterman

By the time all was said and done, the notion that Al Gore and Howard Dean had lost their minds was complete. That was the real intended result of the "angry" accusations - not just to paint them as angry, because then voters might want to know what they were so angry about - but to associate that anger with instability. An angry candidate is a viable candidate, if he's angry for a reason, but an irrational candidate doesn't have a chance.

That's what the Bushies depended on, and now they're hoping that the constituency that once happily cheered the demise of the crazed, angry Democrats won't worry that their fearless leader's recent shows of anger aren't symptomatic of something a bit more...scary. I wouldn't count on it, though. They've trained the monkeys well.