Campaign Anger Management
In the Democratic race for the White House, it's the year of the angry man, reports CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts.
Howard Dean tapped in first with anti-war message, and his fellow candidates have been chasing him ever since.
"This is disgusting," says Dean on the campaign trail. "The president does not deserve to be the president."
Even the TV ads seem angry.
"I love America, but I hate the direction in which George Bush is taking us," says Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., in a campaign commercial.
"I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs," says an ad for the GOP-leaning Club for Growth, which began running in Iowa this week.
And anger seems to sell in America. At the moment, here in Iowa, voters have a laundry list of complaints: a third of the state's National Guardsmen are on active duty in Iraq, unemployment's way up, teacher pay is down.
"I'm angry every time I see the news and another American boy is killed in Iraq," says Iowa voter Gordon Bleaderman, a breakfast regular at Des Moines' 35th Street Grill. "I think I own an element of anger."
"When I do my own little poll in the office asking people, 'Are you better off today than you were four years ago,' the overwhelming answer is, 'No,'" says Dana Erickson, a local mid-wife.
"Iowa voters are very angry," says veteran political reporter David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register. But Yepsen says all that anger could backfire.
"I think the anger thing is working well for Howard Dean. Other candidates are emulating that," Yepsen says. "The question is whether Democrats go too far with that. Angry people make political mistakes and alienate voters."
For that reason, Sen. John Edwards and retired Gen. Wesley Clark are trying the high road.
"We've now gone to attack ads about attack ads,'' said Edwards on the campaign trail.
"I think the anger is real," Edwards tells Pitts. But anger, he says, is the easy part.
"It's important to make the transition from the passion and the anger to building the kind of country we can build together," Edwards says.
It's a transition facing the entire Democratic field. Dean is already trying to soften his image because while anger may sell, optimism wins elections.