Politics & Power Quote by Robert Novak

Novak’s move here is to treat “distorting facts” as the boring, baseline sin of politics, then pivot to a sharper charge: not that Howard Dean is lying, but that he’s misreading the incentives of the moment. It’s a classic beltway scalpel. By conceding that politicians spin as a matter of course, Novak disarms the easy rebuttal (“everyone does it”) and reframes the story as tactical incompetence - a failure to understand what kind of argument a party base can carry without detonating on impact.

The rhetorical question is the weapon. “Is it good politics” sounds like a neutral inquiry, but it’s really an indictment delivered with plausible deniability. Novak isn’t debating Iraq policy on the merits; he’s policing the boundaries of acceptable dissent during the post-invasion backlash. The comparison he sets up - Saddam’s dictatorship versus “even a flawed Islamic republic” - forces Dean into an impossible posture: either endorse the invasion’s moral premise or risk being read as nostalgic for tyranny. That’s the trap. It turns a nuanced critique (the war’s execution, the aftermath, the intelligence) into a binary moral test.

Context matters: Dean’s rise was powered by anti-war energy and grassroots activists, and Novak is writing from a Washington culture that prizes “electability” as an ideology. The line about “many activists... are puzzled” is a subtle wedge, implying Dean is out of sync with his own troops. It’s not just a shot at Dean’s statement; it’s an attempt to isolate him from the coalition that made him dangerous.