It goes without saying that ...

It appears that you are laboring under a misconception - that American politics has some semblence of reason or logic behind it.

The best description of American politics is:

Place 10 pre-schoolers in a room with a broken dish. Ask them who did it!

Place 10 pre-schoolers in a room with a candy bar and tell them that whoever was the best behaved would get the candy and that they had to decide the winner. Then get the he!! out of the way!.

If a politician says: "I didn't do it!", he really means he did do it or he knows who did.

If a politician says: "I taking it under consideration!", he really means he doesn't have a clue what you're talking about and he doesn't really care.

If a politician says: "I promise to.......", he realy means he will if he gets enough money for it. Always wait for the whispered "except", "unless" that follows the 'I promise to...".

I didn't see the live speech, and only read the "official" version of the prepared text that was posted on his campaign website... but it appears to me that the comment you heard was an extemporaneous quip to the crowd. A lot of people, including most of the press, thought Howard Dean had a lot of promise before the primaries began, so he gets a lot of coverage for anything he does or says. For better or worse, he keeps coming in a distant third or fourth in the voting. He has been desperately trying to catch up. Yesterday was another big primary (in Michigan this time). Yesterday all day he was telling anybody who would listen that he was gonna win this one, gonna keep going, yada yada yada. He bombed again. Last night, he thought long and hard about it all, and decided to pull the plug. This morning, he went back to his home state (Vermont), where with just a few hours notice, the crowds turned out to hear him announce his withdrawal. The opening comment was not in the prepared speech, but was probably a spontaneous and gracious comment to the crowd of supporters who yesterday were not expecting to come out this morning and stand around in the cold to hear their favorite candidate drop out of the race. The speechwriters probably had nothing to do with it.

dw