Dean's concession speech yowl may define image in public mind.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Thomas Fitzgerald

MANCHESTER, N.H. _ The sound rumbled up from deep within former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean at his Iowa campaign headquarters Monday night, a guttural howl that sounded like a wounded cougar.

Two days later, his yowl continues to reverberate in the Democratic presidential race. Comedian Jay Leno has joked about it for two nights running, Boston talk-radio hosts use Dean's primal scream as a soundtrack and mocking remixes of it are available on the Internet.

"Yeaaaahhhhhhghhhh!" Dean shouted near the end of his roaring speech Monday to supporters absorbing news of his crushing Iowa defeat. As he tried to rally his troops at the Val Air ballroom, a '70s-era disco palace just outside Des Moines, he peeled off his suit coat, rolled up his sleeves, punched the air, bared his teeth and shouted a litany of the states where he'd continue to fight. TV footage of the moment is riveting.

Dean faces the risk that his performance will form an indelible image of him as too angry and unstable to be president, political analysts said Wednesday. Some called it a potential defining "Muskie Moment," a reference to a devastating image of former Democratic Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine apparently crying over an insult to his wife, which helped kill his once front-running 1972 presidential campaign.

Dean "looked like a prairie dog on speed," former Wyoming Sen. Alan K. Simpson, a Republican, said on CNN.

"I'm not an expert in politics," Leno said Monday night. "But I think it's a bad sign when your speech ends with your aides shooting you with a tranquilizer gun."

Leno came back for more Tuesday: "Did you seen Howard Dean's speech last night? Oh, my God! Now I hear the cows in Iowa are afraid of getting mad-Dean disease."

For two solid days, clips of Dean's rant have aired nationally, a danger for a candidate unknown to many voters. Added to earlier incidents such as the dressing-down he gave a heckler last week in Iowa, it could feed the perception that he has serious anger issues.

He's already taking a hit in New Hampshire.

Tuesday night's tracking poll by the American Research Group showed his favorable rating down dramatically: 39 percent favorable, 30 percent unfavorable and 31 percent undecided, compared with 57 percent favorable, 19 percent unfavorable and 24 percent undecided for the three nights ending Monday.

"Anger was the rap on him anyway, and this is extremely damaging," said pollster Dick Bennett. "It was the worst thing he could have done. It just fits with the perception. ... If it gets burned in, he's done."

Bennett compared Dean's fiery speech to the famous incident when Muskie appeared to cry as he stood outside in the snow and denounced the Manchester Union Leader newspaper, which had attacked his wife in an editorial. Most historians now think the apparent tears were only melting snow, but the image proved devastating. During the Cold War, people wanted tough presidents.

"There are these trivial events often in the primary that come to symbolize something important," said Linda Fowler, a political scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. "My own view is that Dean was exhausted; when he was governor of Vermont, he was not known for rebel yells. But almost everyone has seen it by now, and it's a piece of information for voters eager to narrow their choices."

Fowler and others said there was time for Dean to undo any damage from his manic performance and defeat in Iowa. A Dartmouth post-primary survey of New Hampshire voters in 2000, for instance, found that 30 percent made up their minds in the last two days.

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In the first 36 hours after the speech, the candidate seemed sedated. Dean put his suit back on and stopped thrusting his finger at audiences. Even in a meeting with volunteers in his state headquarters Wednesday morning, he stood behind a lectern and gave a wonkish talk on campaign-finance reform.

Dean went home Wednesday to Burlington, Vt., to honor a commitment to attend his son Paul's high school hockey game. A senior Dean adviser said he would use Thursday night's televised debate in New Hampshire to propose limiting contributions in federal races to $250 or less.

Still, Dean couldn't avoid the Iowa speech in 12 satellite interviews Wednesday afternoon with TV affiliates in the upcoming primary states of Oklahoma, Missouri, Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Maine, Washington state and South Carolina.

"Well, I think it's too bad they didn't show the audience in the clips," Dean said in one. "There were 3,500 kids waving American flags who'd worked their hearts out for me for three weeks. I thought I owed it to them to really try to pep them up again."

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(Fitzgerald reports for The Philadelphia Inquirer.)

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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.