Primal Dean

Poor Matt. He?s been drawn into a vortex of blogger interviews. You know the drill: How will blogging change politics? What difference will blogging make to the convention? Which one of you bloggers charged these drinks to the Reason account? Etc.

I tried to ask Mathew Gross some of these questions last night, at a Cambridge bar. Mathew?s the guy who ran Howard Dean?s Blog for America, or America for Blogs, or YEEEEEAAAAARGH.com, or whatever it was called. Nice guy, Mathew, so it was fun torturing him for details about Dean?s Scream.

Mathew backs up the story that people present during the howling had no notion it was a meltdown moment. Blended with the crowd noise generated by excitable Deaniacs, the Scream seemed to be a routine sonic episode from the short, shouty candidate. Dean didn?t consider how the speech might have sounded when isolated from his background chorus (microphones will do that). Neither did Mathew. And then the worried phone calls started rolling in, and everybody slowly began to realise that they?d been witness to something very wonderful indeed (well, Mathew didn?t actually say that. I?m interpreting his meaning based on the way he stared at the ground and shook his head slowly).

Our conversation was then interrupted by the appearance of two elderly anarchists who commenced arguing in the street with a Scotsman, and I was forced to provide an interpretation service. Weird thing is, I think all three of them were Dean supporters.