Video Essay: The MYTH of a career-ending SCREAM.

A video essay about Howard Dean and how he (allegedly) ended his campaign through a single, silly scream.

Apr 20, 2025

Hi, I’m George Westcott. I have been fascinated by Howard Dean for a long time. This has been a strange and very isolating time but I think that this is a really interesting story. Therefore, I am proud to announce the second QUILTRO MAG video essay. I will make more Chile-focused ones in the future but QUILTRO has always been guided first and foremost by my own interests and passions.

You can watch the full video on YouTube, and find the attached script with sources.

I will write a traditional essay very soon, there are some thoughts I need to get onto the page. If this is frustrating, I am sorry. The traditional essays are coming, though.

Full script

There's a title posted on a CNN YouTube video that haunts me. Strangely it is not videos of death and destruction overseas, the worst war footage that a large media organization is allowed to post on YouTube. This video is titled, "the scream that doomed Howard Dean".

I will play the video in its entirety.

(PLAY VIDEO)

Hi, I'm George Westcott. Strangely, this is what I think about when I go to sleep—not the videos of car crashes, carpet bombings done by the US military, or the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Instead, it's a man from Vermont making a funny noise, seemingly marking the end of his presidential campaign. I recognize that my energy might be better spent elsewhere. I would rather think about the world collapsing than a story that is years gone and of no real significance.

But yet, I still lie awake, haunted by the video and its title. Maybe it's the word "doomed," or maybe the fact that this is the video that ended a man's political career. I think about this video more than I probably should.

I think this video is largely cut out of the popular discussion of contemporary politics. A long-forgotten remnant of a day gone by. Yet, I think it's an essential base, a foundational text, in how politics work today. In a day and age where memes and politics go hand in hand, it might be of use to look into what has been widely referred to as "the first political meme".

Chapter 1. Howard Dean and the complete history of the scream

So I feel like I need to make a quick disclaimer before I go any further. I am not an American and hence there’s a good chance that there’s something in the minutia which might get lost or misread. I don’t have the lived experience of American politics but I have done my best to get all the details correct. As a non-American, I ask forgiveness in advance.

So, who's Howard Dean? Howard Brush Dean III was born in 1948 in New York to Andrée Belden and Howard Brush Dean Jr. The family was upper class and highly politically involved, deeply invested in the Republican Party. Growing up in the Hamptons, the deans grew up in what we would call the WASP circles, White Anglo Saxon Protestants. His father worked in stocks and his mother was an art appraiser, growing up in the country club and private school Center of the US.

However, Howard Dean was a standout in the Hamptons. By any Metric, Howard Dean should have been a stereotypical east-coast upper class by any metric. Instead, there is something off, a certain difference noted by political onlookers and his childhood friends. He was noted to be, and I mean this in the most relative way possible, working class by the Hamptons standards. In a community where everyone was an owner or a boss in some way, the upper echelon of American society, the deans would go to work every day and come back home, working like any other job. This was a standout point in Howard Dean's life, being as previously mentioned by his friends growing up. It might posit that this is why Howard Dean might have shifted to a more left-leaning perspective all things considered, possibly seeing the issues of class, even in some cosmological way, in his community.

Regardless, Howard Dean would go study at Yale, like a large part of the wasp community he had grown up around. Dean would go on to receive a bachelor's degree in political science and later on his medical degree. One of the standout stories of his stay at Yale was his requesting specifically that he be put in a dorm with an African American student. During his stay at Yale, he was roomed with ", an African American student from a working-class background. This is what he had to say about him.

After his years at Yale, Dean moved back to Vermont, continuing a medical residency program at the University of Vermont. Meanwhile, this is all going on, Dean slowly began growing in the political ranks. This is mostly through his grassroots approach to political campaigning. After a successful series of protests and organizing for the protection of a lake instead of building a condominium. This allowed Dean a spot in the 1980 democratic convention. This continued later in his life after he had continued campaigning for the Democratic Party where he was elected into the Vermont House of Representatives. Eventually, He was elected lieutenant governor in 1986 and reelected in 1988 and 1990. This is all meanwhile he continued his medical practice with his wife, who was also a doctor. I can't rid myself of the idea that there was something quite work-focused about Howard Dean, the fact that he lived in an area of inherited wealth and capital owners where he was one of the only families in his circle who would go have a more "traditional" work life. Of course, Howard Dean lived in absolute privilege but there is something to be said about relativity and the way that he might've felt working class about wealthy capital-owning families.

Now, on August 13th, 1991, Dean was working at his medical practice like he had done any other day. He clocked into work and was going through the motions of a normal workday. It was then, mid-examination he received the news that the then-sitting governor Richard N Snelling had suddenly died of cardiac arrest. Dean took the job, making him the governor of Vermont. Dean would be elected 5 times for two-year terms which still makes him the longest-running Vermont governor in the history of the state.

His stay in office is interesting in its own right but I will give the highlights for what he did. Throughout his stay as governor, he increased social welfare through the Dr. Dynasaur specifically aimed at children and pregnant mothers. In addition, in 2000 after a Supreme Court decision claiming the exclusion of same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, Dean signed civil union into law, legalizing same-sex marriage in Vermont.

So, suddenly, and for what he is known for best, Howard Dean ran for president. He claimed that his run for the presidency was a "long shot". In 2003, Howard Dean stood in Burlington and spoke. A vehement opponent of the Iraq war, Dean critiqued the democratic lack of action when it came to their unilateral support for the invasion of Iraq.

He specifically said, "What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the President's unilateral intervention in Iraq?"

This set the tone for the rest of his campaign, getting support based on being one of the only democrats who were against the Iraq war. The speech resonated so much with people that it was covered in the magazine "The New Republic" which created more eyes on his political campaign. Slowly and surely he was gaining traction and by the summer of 2003, Howard Dean was a forerunner for the Democratic Party.

What is incredibly particular about Dean is that he was one of the first politicians to utilize the Internet in an attempt to organize. Specifically he utilized Meet-up.com as a medium for which to track his supporters but also be able to hear directly from his base of support. This might seem quite simple in an age where every politician has an Instagram, a Twitter (I refuse to call it X) and half the men above 65 are using Grindr behind their wife's back. However, this was a revolutionary strategy and one of the first examples of large-scale grassroots organizing through the Internet.

Howard Dean ran on several issues throughout his campaign. These included the like of universal healthcare and fiscal responsibilities. However, his popularity specifically for being one of the only politicians criticizing the war in Iraq meant that his campaign centered more and more on anti-war messaging.

Following this he slowly began gaining more endorsements. Ex-vice president Al Gore gave his endorsement to Howard Dean in 2003. This was then followed by a series of senators including Bill Bradley, Tom Harkin, and Carol Mosley Brown. Harkin specifically commented on the Gettysburg Times, "the Harry Truman of our time ... the kind of plainspoken Democrat we need"

According to the members of the dean's political campaigning group, with the growing support for the candidate, they felt "invincible"

Overall, Dean was beginning to build up momentum and his prospects seemed incredible. He was even on the front cover of Time magazine in August of 2003. I think Time magazine is not necessarily "good" reflecting culture and politics at the time but this still marks him as being the big contender against an Iraq war Bush.

However, Dean was fighting a tough match. Against him stood two also incredibly popular democratic candidates. Important to mention is John Kerry, a competing Democrat and senator at that moment. John Kerry was a more stable candidate, regarded by Jack Holmes writing for Esquire, to be a more institution-aligned candidate in contrast to Dean who was more outside the box, a left-leaning populist.

The big moment came right on the 2004 democratic primaries. The first state in the US to vote is Iowa and the Iowa caucus meant the start of the democratic primaries, electing the candidate that would go against Bush. The tensions were hot and the Dean's staff were ready to go for the candidacy.

The team behind Howard Dean was aware that he was rougher around the edges. As I mentioned before, Dean would say what he meant quite directly, separating himself from more institutional democrats running at the time. This had seemingly made him come into conflict in early debates where he was both criticized and praised for being brash. After the first democratic debate, his staffers had told him to hold back during his speeches a certain bit. If you look at post-debate speeches that Dean held, he seems like he's holding back, more reserved than his first speeches that had bought him so much attention.

The day of this speech, just so happening on MLK day, would be different. Dean needed to make an impression in Iowa and his reserved performance would not cut it. According to one of his advisors in an interview with PBS Iowa, he tells the story about how when they arrived in Iowa they got off the bus and the first person they met was then Iowa congressman Tom Harkin. As he tells it, Dean asks Harkin what he should say to the crowd, Harkin responds that he should take off his jacket and just "let it rip". This was permission enough to let loose.

Dean got on stage, calling passionately to his public as he took off his jacket. Dean called to the fact that he would not only be going to New Hampshire but also South Carolina Oklahoma Arizona North Dakota and New Mexico. They were going to California Texas and New York. They were going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then going to Washington, D.C. That they were going to take back the White House!

Then, it happens. The scream. (Yeah reverb)

Chapter 2. What the media did to Howard Dean

So, to say that the scream was impactful is an understatement. In the moments following the rally, they thought nothing of the scream, treating the rally as just another political speech. The one thing that one member of staff noticed was that there was one section of Dean's speech that kept being replayed in a bar they went to after the rally. Thinking nothing of it, they left for New Hampshire, planning to do another speech. Even there, Dean was not asked by the press about the scream, they still believed that nothing was happening.

It was at that time that the networks began covering Dean's scream. According to Eric Salzman, a CBS reporter, it was the editors at CBS who decided to focus on the scream. According to him, the reporters who were on the ground that day in Iowa fought against the decision of the editors, claiming that they were misunderstanding the footage and that it came thought differently there on the campaign trail.

This didn't matter. The Dean's scream had gone viral. It is normally referred to as the first political meme, being used in edits and remixes. It was also nicknamed the "I Have a Scream" speech owing to the fact that it was done on MLK day. The clip was aired a total of 633 times over the four days following the speech on cable and network TV. The Dean scream was officially a meme, being the sole focus of Howard Dean in the media.

Jay Leno commented on the speech (play Jay Leno's reaction"

David Letterman covered the speech (play David Letterman's Coverage"

The internet has distorted this moment into something different. It had reduced Howard Dean to this one single moment. Remixes of the scream spread around the internet, using the scream as a placeholder for any other scream in popular culture.

Dean had already been critiqued by the largely pro-Iraq war right wing of the US this allowed for the the conservative media to continue to dogpile onto the moment, a justification for mocking their opponents.

Howard Dean's team claimed that the scream caused irreparable harm to the campaign. Dean tried to reconcile with the general populace by going to several media appearances and sending out VHS copies of the campaign to New Hampshire. This didn't help Howard Dean's campaign. According to one of the staffers in an interview for Esquire, They wanted to "go to the CBS office and set it on fire with gasoline".

Howard Dean's career was ended by a scream.

At least, that's the story I would like to tell.

There's a key detail that I have been lying about throughout this whole story. Howard Dean had lost the Iowa primary election before his speech. He had come out third in the Iowa race. The Dean Scream speech was organized after the results of the Iowa election had come out, in an attempt to gain favor after losing the general public. The Dean's scream speech was an attempt to save face.

A lot of historians have claimed that the Dean scream was not as important an event to Howard Dean's political fall. The idea is that Dean was already on a losing streak and with the increasing anti-dean media being published by the right-wing opposition, Dean had little chance of winning. The establishment was utilizing the scream to discredit Dean but they had been doing it long before the speech. In addition, Dean's campaign suffered from organizational issues and was too layered on winning the Iowa election, losing focus on the rest of the country.

According to a FiftyThirtyEight section in 2016, Christine Pelosi claims that Dean was not doomed by the scream but instead by coming out third in the Iowa election.

Yet, this is still the dominant narrative. That dean was doomed by his scream. The CNN video is not titled, "The Scream that was Reflective of Howard Dean's Loss in Iowa" instead it is still "The Scream that Doomed Howard Dean".

Additionally, I've seen a lot of content creators covering the story saying that the scream was his undoing and that the scream was the end of Howard Dean's political career.

This is also purely not true. While Dean may have not won the presidential run, he continued to be heavily involved in politics even years after the "Dean scream". Dean went on to be the chairman of the democratic national convention from 2005 to 2009. Dean has also written several best-selling books, a lot of which have served as useful sources for this essay.

Yet still, if you look up Howard Dean, the first result is the dean's scream and how it doomed him. We continue to reduce his career and achievements in life to a single scream, a single infamous scream. Regardless of it being disputed by academics and historians, the story is reduced to a single moment in time.

For the rest of this essay, I hope to answer why this is, why we reduce this story to a single moment regardless of evidence to the contrary. Why do we continue to believe that this scream was his doom?

Chapter 3. The "Singularity theory"

Before I go answering this question, I would like to give actual concrete answers for why something like this could’ve happened.

Of course, there are a couple of elements to it. An opposition-fueled media frenzy to discredit the anti -Iraq war camp in any way. Howard Dean was the popular anti-Iraq war democrat in an era when the Iraq war was at an all-time high. One can easily point towards this as the perfect justification for a smear campaign through the press. This, for political reasons in attempting to discredit anti war positions, was the story that stuck. It is also a story that has faded into obscurity somewhat, coming into view every so often. It is fresh and dead enough to not allow for a retrospective view on what actually happened and for the story to be updated.

However, I think the thing that really stands out to me is how anyone could think that this would end someone’s career in politics today. I don’t want to sound too preachy but modern politics on social media have devolved into the worst people fighting over the presidency, able to behave as they wish. This is not only an American issue but one worldwide, politics in the modern era definitely feels like we’ve devolved.

Furthermore, with our desensitization to the media, we have become numb to behaviour and when I watch a video of Howard Dean making a funny scream, I feel as if I am being given a look into the past. A past wherein someone’s career can seriously go down due to a strange scream, in culture where the strangest of screams are rewarded.

The modern media landscape rewards bad behaviour. I, however, am not a proponent of respectability politics, the idea that people must conform to the dominant culture’s norms and behaviors—especially in terms of appearance, speech, and conduct—in order to gain social acceptance, rights, or credibility. The issue with respectability politics is that it discredits minorities and actively pushes against any form of expression from these groups, or at least that those forms of expression are discredited. What I refer to in this issue is that politicians, especially with the advent of social media, behaving in socially unacceptable ways in order to A) bring attention to themselves in an attention deficient economy and B) appeal closer to the hearts of people through populism. So in response, politicians, especially those conservative and new-right, are allowed to act in antisocial ways more and more.

Looking at Howard Dean posits the realization of how far down we’ve gone. How far the culture has steered and how desensitized we’ve become to behavior in the media. Whenever you go into the comments sections of any video of the dean scream you will be bombarded by comments noting how “politicians today are allowed to act like fools when this was enough to lose someone their career”. In fact, this was a time when we were less exposed towards populism (Howard Dean being described as one) and this video demonstrates a completely foreign reaction to political theatre that has become so commonplace. This was the main reason for why it made a resurgence in 2016 with the esquire article in response to the Trump campaign and the sudden rise of American populism and political theatre.

On a less poignant note, there's something about the humor of the whole situation that makes it stick and keeps showing up. I’m not so dull as to deny people their fun with a funny scream. The dean scream is a legitimately endless source of humor. The funny scream has been part of popular humor throughout the history of mankind. The Wilhelm scream has been reused over and over since 1951. The screaming goat was a mainstay of mid 2000s internet humor. The dean's scream fits perfectly into this tradition. What I ask though is why is the career-ending element, this narrative, the one which stuck?

Howard Dean's life and political campaign doesn't fit a perfect story. I can dramatize it and cut certain key details about the primaries to make it a better story. This is something that happens in any historical endeavor with a narrative focus. Just now I cut out the fact that they had lost that primary to increase the importance of the scream, and it makes a better story. However, if you look at the story as just more fizzling out with a funny detail, Dean's story doesn't feel as exciting, the scream as relevant. This piece of media which went so viral loses meaning, if you know that he had lost that day and his campaign was seemingly falling apart. If we tell the story through the lens of the campaign ending scream, it would then become a good story in that sense. We feed off of drama ever since we began telling stories. It is more enticing to give a climax to the story, to narrativize this man's life.

I’m obsessed with this idea of the single moment. I think we love a singularity, a moment where everything leads to and comes from. Much like a big bang or a let there be light moment, it helps us explain large amounts of information into a condensed form. In some sense it gives a specific moment a direct meaning and sense of gravitas, a point to why it happened, removed from its context through mass spectacle alone. We are seemingly fascinated by these moments, not only because they are easier to understand with less information, but because they make better stories, they feel better emotionally.

Of course, I’m not the first to think of this. Guy Debord wrote heavily about the subject in his 1967 book, Society of the spectacle. In it, he argues that in modern societies, the representation of reality has overtaken reality itself. We no longer experience events directly—we consume them as images, as performances. Furthermore, he specifically posits that the societal push towards the spectacle has obscured our relationship with reality and it serves as a lens from which we look at said reality. We understand our past, present and future through the lens of spectacle. The want to make things digestible, our need for shorthand, is an extension of the all consuming nature of spectacle. It is spectacle, single moments and shorthand as ideology. It is maybe best to exemplify what I mean with this.

I sometimes think about the way that we explain WW1 to people. We tell the story through the lens of it having begun with the assassination of archduke Franz ferndinand. While this is largely true, it is shorthand, a focus on the spectacle. It is easier to explain that this was the bursting moment that led to the war rather than having to explain all the different power relations that were building up to said war. It’s not only easier, but it makes a better story, it is a better narrative with more meaning and higher spectacle. It makes more sense emotionally to explain it through a single moment. This moment is no longer just a part of the larger context that led into WW1 but instead is given direct meaning, importance.

I sometimes think about Freddie Mercury’s life and the way we tell it. In the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic of the band queen and more largely Freddie Mercury as a person, the film ends with a recreation of their live aid show. They actively change the history of events in order to make a more narratively fulfilling movie, in which everything in Freddy’s life has led to this one final show. The live aid show was not Queen’s final show, and Freddie did not pass away right after it. However, the mass spectacle of the concert made it so that, when the movie was being written, the live aid show was crammed as this climax to the lives of these people. In some way, spectacle obfuscates reality. This need to retell stories, not through what happened but through an emotional logic is something that permeates this entire movie. This one moment is seemingly more powerful but also is framed as the artificial climax of these real stories. The spectacle alone of the moment rewrites history.

I sometimes think about the Dinosaurs and the way we tell of their extinction. Of course, the Alvarez Hypothesis posits that the dinosaurs were wiped by an asteroid, crashing into the Gulf of Mexico. That has been an idea that has resonated with people more and more and is still considered the best answer to what killed the dinosaur. What I see less conversation about is that said impact was instead the dust that stayed in Earth’s atmosphere and how it was the second most important reason for this mass extinction event. But if we look at any popular representation of the extinction of the dinosaurs, we see it represented as caused purely by the asteroid hitting the earth, the pure explosion causing the mass extinction event. Again, our need for spectacle influences our popular and cultural understanding of reality. It is far more interesting to think about the spectacle of an asteroid crashing into the earth than the dust stopping plants from doing photosynthesis. It is more enticing to believe in the sudden than the drawn out death of life on planet earth.

Howard Dean is in a similar situation. It is more fulfilling, more narratively impactful to put the force of his fall on the scream rather than anything else. Strangely, there is an untold spectacle in the scream, in the idea that there is this climax to Howard Dean’s life. It is enticing to think of this as the peak in Howard Dean’s story, even when given evidence to the contrary. So why do we continue to believe that the scream doomed Howard Dean? Because it makes more sense emotionally, that it speaks to our need for more spectacular stories. This need for spectacle morphs our understanding or reality fundamentally, it changes the way we look at history and people.

What is interesting in this case however, is that this is the mainstream opinion and I rarely see it contested. With the previously mentioned examples there seems to be constant pushback against this narrativization of these actual events. However, with Howard Dean, it seems to remain as is, another title on a CNN video. Maybe it is the fact that the Dean scream slowly faded into political obscurity, not allowing for retrospective. The fact that it is not talked about as much lets it remain as the prevailing telling.

I think about Howard Dean a lot because I feel faced with this instinct, the instinct to think about stories in a way that feels distinctly emotionally rewarding. The pull of spectacle. In a time when I was deeply anxious, as mentioned before, coming out of it I felt like I had lost touch with a lot of my non-anxious instincts. It was like coming out of a cold shower, you feel the air differently. Howard Dean is one of those cases where the story we tell makes more sense emotionally rather than logically. Where spectacle overtakes substance even in a real life context. The factual, non-spectacular, non-enticing evidence of the grandual doesn’t matter as much as the emotional logic to it. In reality, Howard Dean’s scream was more reflective of a general downward fall of his campaign. Emotionally, Howard Dean’s scream doomed his career, the spectacle dictates reality.

So that’s the reason for why the story is as is. I wonder in earnest on whether or not Howard Dean’s story will be critically looked at in retrospect, to amend our strange telling of his story. Of course, it’s not old enough, of enough importance or in the popular consciousness enough to warrant this sort of retrospection. Maybe this video is an attempt to do that maybe but I know I’m a small channel and with not enough power to change the way we look at a story. However, I wonder if we will ever change the way we frame and tell this story. For now, Howard Dean screamed and that doomed his campaign.There's a title posted on a CNN YouTube video that haunts me. Strangely it is not videos of death and destruction overseas, the worst war footage that a large media organization is allowed to post on YouTube. This video is titled, "the scream that doomed Howard Dean".