The Howard Dean Supergroup: What Happens When You Break Up the Band

The left thinks we're engaging in sport when we ask for more Howard Dean, but they're wrong. He really is an election losing machine and we really do hope he'll be around for the long term.

Patrick Ruffini is the GOP's top webmaster and he's got a dead-on opinion about the continued implosion that is Howard Dean. In Ruffini's opinion, the early Dean success had a lot to do with Joe Trippi's team and their web savvy. The problem was that they couldn't carry off the conventional political stuff and Dean was a time bomb waiting to go off.

According to Ruffini, what we've seen since then is Dean without his excellent producer and back up singers. Which leaves Howard with lots of fans who keep wondering why he can't come up with another hit after having three big singles on the first album.

Ruffini:

Dean at the DNC is Dean without Trippi, Dean without the 15,000 person crowds (who can normally be counted upon to drown out the errant shriek), Dean minus the Movement. As it turned out, Dean was perfectly programmed to succeed in that in-between period (2003) where the activists are paying attention, but when the general public has yet to tune in. Once they did tune in, and the focus turned to personality over process, Dean flopped. The Dean chairmanship now is effectively the bookend to the Dean Scream. Now, virtually no one is tuned in – a development aided by keeping Dean in hiding for most of his chairmanship – which means that not even the activists feel vested in his leadership or committed to supporting him when he screws up.

Dean is also a victim of his own success. When he first arrived on the scene, leading Democrats were falling over each other to support the Iraq war, which made Dean's appeal unique. (His "What I want to know" DNC remarks in February '03 left me swearing he'd be the frontrunner before this was all over.) Today, every Democrat is anti-Iraq, and even Joe Biden is sounding like Dean. And when everyone is Howard Dean, the original doesn't seem all that necessary or appealing anymore.

Pretty much right, don't you think? (Hat tip to NRO's Jim Geraghty)