Spring is slow this year. Winter storms in some parts, chilly in New England, heat and tornadoes in the mid-West, mumps moving east. The buds and the birds are slow in arriving.
But Howard Dean, not one to adhere to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring theory in any way, shape or form, is off on another tangent, with huge, nearly incomprehensible ideas clogging his seething mind.
Just the other day he gave up on his tried and true method of discerning his next message tack on the good ship Lollypop, the SS DNC, when he forbade the continued use of fortune cookies and their hidden messages as the foundation for the Party line.
From now on, he decreed a week ago, we'll seek other methods to provide us all with our big-league communiques.
Pawing through the large circular file which marks the center of his office filing system, and to which he adds a voluminous amount of key materiel daily, he spied an old catalogue which contained just the item he'd been searching for, the gizmo that had figured so prominently in his hallucinations of late.
"Hey," he hollered to no one in particular, "I was getting good and tired of Harry Chin's cookies anyway, does anybody have a crayon?" Dammit, where are all those old prescription pads I used to have, I've got to write this down.
The next day a few large boxes appeared at Howard's office, where his loyal staff quickly assembled their contents.
Soon, the outer office was treated to the growing vision of a large wooden framework on which was suspended a sturdy wooden wheel, divided into a series of pie shaped sections, on which slogans were written. Centered on the outer edge of each wedge was a single pin, which, when the apparatus was spun, ticked against a semi-rigid pointer, slowing it. When stopped, the pointer selected a certain phrase, approved beforehand by Mr. Dean.
"Come here folks," Howard intoned as the curious staff gathered around the newly completed contraption. "This will be our new fortune cookie. I'll use this to select the Democratic Party's new catchphrases, right here in our office. We won't need to spend all night kicking ideas around. These 46 slogans will just pop up when the pointer picks one. Yes, yes, I know, if it picks the same one twice, we'll just… spin it again."
The staff looked in awe at the lines--Impeach Bush, Fire Rumsfeld, Generals Know Best, Iraq War is Lost, Character Issues, Tough Border Control, Christianity is the Opiate of the Masses, the list went on and on.
"Let's give it try for my Wednesday breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel."
Howard easily spun the gigantic wheel, almost effortlessly it seemed. Ticka, ticka, ticka, went the pointer as the gizmo slowly lost energy and ground to a halt, stopping on… Tough Border Control.
"Well, that's it folks, it's time for us Democrats to get tough on the borders."
and with a swoosh and a mighty wind, which scattered papers and unwound hairdos, Mr. Dean, the hero of the little man, the former doctor, internet money raising guru, the man from Vermont, the brains from Brattleboro, the gabber from Goshen, retired into his logic littered office, brushed cookie crumbs from his desk top and began to peck away at his computer, charting a new course for the DNC and plunging his party head first into the muddy opaque waters of the Rio Grande.
The next morning, Howard Dean, the Chairman of the DNC, feeling his eleven cups of coffee and remembering his new machine and what it told him, with his sleeves rolled up, his eyes bloodshot with conviction, hollered at the breakfast crowd, "…we want border control, and if we have to increase the federal protection along the borders, we will."
Carried away by his rhetoric and the rising enthusiasm he garnered from the folks seen rolling the green melon balls on their plates in the first two rows of tables, he went on.
"I have no intention of losing this battle. They started it, and we are going to win it," Mr. Dean hammered home with a deft series of Bill Richardson popularized boxing jabs.
Following the post-bombast gladhanding, he called the office as soon as he could free himself.
"Is the new machine okay? Is everything running all right?" he hurriedly enquired.
Yes, he was told, everything was running fine. The rotator had been lubricated and turned a few times as Howard had ordered before he departed.
The new wheel of fortune at the DNC is operating perfectly and its neoteric message is getting out emphatically through its fulminating front man.
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