Howard Dean
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Dean’s brand of dickishness is unique. His actions often reveal good intentions, and most of his dick moves tend to come in the form of getting people’s hopes up for lost causes, which only serves to make his inevitable failures more devastating. (See 2004 Democratic Primaries, 2008 Democratic Primaries, and the Democratic Party in general.)
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Early life
Howard Brush Dean III was born in East Hampton, New York, to Howard Brush Dean, Jr. and Andrée Belden Maitland, an art appraiser. If you’re keeping score, that’s three dickish things in just one sentence: 1) Having a roman numeral as part of your name. 2) Growing up in a ritzy resort town. 3) Having a parent who is an art appraiser.
As those three things suggest, the Dean family was loaded. Dean’s father, Howard Dean II (aka “The Deuce”) worked at Dean Witter, voted Republican, and belonged to the exclusive Maidstone Golf Club in East Hampton. Young Howard also attended various exclusive prep schools in Manhattan, Rhode Island, and the UK. If there were such a thing as a dick recipe, the ingredients would sound very similar to those elements involved in Dean’s upbringing.
Yale and post-college
Dean went on to attend noted Ivy League dick assembly line, Yale University, choosing the dickish major of political science, then crowning his dickdom by joining the Zeta Psi fraternity, whose hazing rituals most likely involved literal dicks.
Mildly rebelling against the dickish life that had been laid out before him by his parents, Dean requested specifically to room with an African-American during his freshman year. It seems the only way one can rebel against such a dick upbringing is by being open-minded and accepting of other people’s race and culture. Ma and Pa Dean sure musta been steamed!
Jumping back on the dick train, Dean attended his second Ivy League school, Columbia as a pre-med student, then received his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1978, adding the dickishly pretentious “M.D.” to the end of his name, right after the pretentious “III.”
Green mountain state politics
In 1980, Dr. Dean volunteered to work for President Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign, thus beginning a lifelong career in politics as well as a lifelong career of getting people excited for things that will most certainly not happen. With Dean’s help, Carter narrowly lost the election to a 70 year-old B-movie actor by a tally of 489 electoral votes to 49.
Since politics attracts dicks like Pam Anderson attracts scumbags, it was only a matter of time before Dean was running for office himself. In 1982, he was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives, then, became the state’s lieutenant governor in 1986. The fact that Vermont even has a government at all might come as a surprise to the millions of Americans who think that it is just a gigantic factory that produces maple syrup and adorable teddy bears.
In 1991, Dean eventually became governor in an inadvertently dicky way: when then-current Governor Richard A. Snelling died of a heart attack while cleaning his own swimming pool. During his ten year stint as governor, Dean would never have to worry about meeting the same fate because nobody with his upbringing would ever be caught dead cleaning their own pool (with apologies to the late Gov. Snelling).
In 2000, Governor Dean made national headlines when he signed the nation's first civil unions legislation into law. While allowing same-sex couples the dignity of legal status and benefits does not sound like a dick move on the surface, it did however lead to a national backlash that vaulted Republican “values” politicians into office, including patron saint of dicks, George W. Bush. By the transitive property, makes Dean a dick of enormous proportions.
Deaniacs
Dean entered the 2004 presidential campaign as a long-shot candidate, but his harsh stance on Democrats who voted for the Iraq War attracted the attention of grassroots party activists, otherwise known as “those crazy people you always see protesting on TV”. These are also the same crazy people who spend all their non-effigy burning time on the internet, and Dean took advantage of their fixation on chat rooms and World of Warcraft by giving them something else to obsess about online: him.
Along with free time, Dean’s computer-based constituency also apparently had some comic book money to spare, because in a matter of months HDIII raised enough cash online to become the apparent frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. “Deaniacs,” as Dean supporters came to be known, achieved their own special distinction in dick history, as most of them were not dicks in their own right, but only became so when combined together in a supergroup with a silly name, much like the Traveling Wilburys.
While Dean’s ability to attract virtual voters to virtual locations was historic, his campaign lacked the real world infrastructure to get real voters to the real polls. The onetime frontrunner finished a disappointing third place in the Iowa caucuses, behind a guy who looks like a stiffer version of Frankenstein’s monster and a smarmy southern lawyer with the haircut of an eleven-year-old.
While this one loss was a setback, Dean still probably would’ve had a shot at the nomination had it not been for his speech that day in which he made the poor choice of presenting himself as a deranged lunatic. In reality, the “Dean Scream” speech wasn’t all that crazy, but after CNN ran a brief clip more than 600 times, people tend to remember it as something like this: “And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! YYAAAARRGGGHHHHBYAWAWAWWWAWHAWHHAHHWHAAAHWWHWW IAMCRAZYANDWILLMURDERYOURCHILRDENWHILETHEYSLEEPWWAGRRRAWWWW!!!”
Demoted to head of his party
Somehow, withdrawing in shame from the Democratic primaries resulted in Dean being promoted to head of the entire party. He was elected Chairman (“Head Dick”) of the Democratic National Committee in 2005. Many Democrats, including House Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid opposed Dean’s candidacy, which probably makes for some really awkward elevator rides at the Capitol building.
Thus far, the major accomplishment of Dean’s tenure as Chairman has been his 50-State Strategy. Under this plan, instead of just throwing their money into losing elections in states in which they actually have a chance of winning, Democrats wasted funds in Republican stronghold states they were certainly going to lose anyway.
In early 2008, Dean’s Democratic Party seemed to be a lock to win that year’s presidential election. The base was both united and excited to take back the White House, but with Dean in the drivers seat, Democrats should’ve know better than to get their hopes up. In true dick fashion, Dean stood back as both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton refused to drop out of the race, splitting the once-united party into two warring factions that could have cost their party the election to yet another doddering Republican senior citizen.
2008 election and on
In the 2008 general election, Dean's 50-State Strategy miraculously didn't look as dumb as first thought. Following a very successful election for the Democrats, Dean resigned his position as head of the party, not content with having to play second fiddle to the man he just helped elect president.
During what will surely be a brief respite from national politics, it is expected that Dean will return home to spend time screaming with his family.
