Lonely antiwar banner pulls in crowd for Dean

WASHINGTON -- The speech was so unsparing an evisceration of President George W. Bush that it could have been downloaded from the Howard Dean Web site: Bush misled the country into a devastating war. His policies are "designed to benefit friends and supporters." He has led the country to fiscal ruination. Worst of all, both parties in Congress have failed to provide any counterbalance to Bush's views.

The speaker, hoping back on August 7 to breath some fire into a then-tepid Democratic campaign, was former Vice President Al Gore. And he ended it with a little prod to the candidates, promising that "later in the campaign cycle I will endorse" a Democrat to take on Bush.

Now, as Gore prepares to endorse Dean, political analysts are already weighing in with the view that the endorsement represents the growing acclimation of the "Democratic establishment" to the loudest insurgent in the race, a candidate who attacks Congressional Democrats almost as readily as he takes on Republicans.

Perhaps it does. But reading Gore's speech from four months ago, few could escape the idea that this endorsement was destined from the start. And Gore, despite his unique vantage point, is in the same position as most Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq: He found himself with only one candidate who could plausibly carry his views on Iraq into battle.

Dean's ascendance from former small-state governor to frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination without a single vote being cast is impressive. But it cannot completely come as a surprise to those who remember the Carter and Clinton campaigns. More surprising is the way Dean has done it. While Carter and Clinton slowly built support for their moderate views, like horse whisperers trying to sooth feuding Democratic factions, Dean loudly proclaimed his views and waited for the party to come to him.

It has. But it's important to note that much of Dean's support has come to him by default; that vaunted Internet network of mostly antiwar voters found Dean, not the other way around.

And the reason is a combination of one politically courageous stand -- opposing war in Iraq -- and the good fortune that no other mainstream Democratic candidate was willing to take the same stand.

Subtracting the three underfunded longshots, Dean is competing against three Democratic senators and one former House leader who each voted to give Bush the power to go to war in Iraq, plus a retired general who praised the Bush defense team as recently as two years ago. And while all of them have amped up their criticism of Bush in the months since Gore's August 7 address, they all played roles in accommodating Bush's war. That means they often end up spending more time on the campaign trail explaining the nuances of their past positions on Iraq than they do assailing Bush.

War -- unlike, say, Medicare and taxes -- isn't the type of issue on which voters are open to a multiplicity of views. For many who stood against the Iraq War from the beginning, their opposition is a conscience position that is immutable. Dean, it seems, is winning almost all of them.

For those who may have wavered on the war, but came to see it as a mistake, Dean's unfussed explanation of what went wrong seems to go over well. In theory, a Democrat who supported the war could make a clean break and speak for those who feel they were misled by Bush, but no one has renounced his vote so far.

So Dean stands alone.

Gore, in his attraction to Dean, seems much like every other antiwar Democrat. His antipathy toward Bush may date back to the 2000 campaign, and his passion may spring from anger over the Florida recount. He may be consumed with feelings of how he would have handled things differently.

But judging by his recent statements, Gore's anger toward Bush is more than sour grapes. It's roughly the same feeling of discomfort about Bush's fracturing of international alliances that many Democrats feel. It's the same sense that corporate interests are getting a better deal than they deserve in Bush's Washington. It's the frustration of being shut out of government at all levels.

Many of the so-called "Bush haters" have, one by one, found their way to Howard Dean. And so it's not surprising that Gore would eventually find his way, as well. After all, who could stand more angry at George W. Bush than Al Gore?

Peter Canellos can be reached at canellos@globe.com.