Howard Dean: Penny Stock

There is no explaining the Howard Dean campaign other than as a footnote to the great Internet stock market bubble of 1999. You remember when investors bid up the price of a slew of Internet stocks on the basis of the promise of, well, the Internet itself? Never mind the faulty business models; never mind that most of these companies never earned a penny. Finally, the bubble burst when it became clear that there was no money to be made by the likes of Webvan.com and Pets.com.

Then came Howard Dean -- an obscure, longshot running for president in the tradition of Jimmy Carter. After Dean dared raise his voice against the war in Iraq, the Internet frenzy began with meetup.com and all that. Soon Dean was deemed the winner of the "Invisible Primary," which goes to the candidate who raises the most money and sits atop the (meaningless) opinion polls in the year before Election Year. Inasmuch as the winner of the Invisible Primary usually gets the nomination, Dean's stock was soaring at the beginning of 2004.

But when it came time to actually win votes -- akin to when the time came for the dot.coms to actually start making money -- the votes weren't there, and Howard Dean's candidacy collapsed as quickly as tech stocks did in Spring 2000. Since then, he has been staggering about, largely incoherently, kind of like those young start-up would-be millionaires who ran the dot.coms, then realized that, as they had neglected to actually exercise any of their options, they were left with nothing. They cast about for a while, still holding on to their CEO titles, trying to figure out what to do next until finally, mercifully, they closed up shop.

That's Howard Dean today. He remains a candidate, largely from sense memory, as he has done nothing else for the past two years, but since the Iowa caucuses, he's acted shell-shocked, soldiering on for literally no good reason. Wisconsin should put an end to it.