MICKEY KAUS notes that Howard Dean was praising Bush’s war on terror in June of 2002, and speculates on his shift:

But there’s a second, more troubling interpretation, which is that Dean shifted to a strong anti-war position not because of Bush’s Iraq actions, but because he saw that that was where the Democratic party’s activist base wanted him to go. In June 30, 2002, after all, it wasn’t very hard to see the Iraq conflict looming on the horizon. President Bush had already included Iraq in his “axis of evil.” Vice-President Cheney had toured the Middle East to drum up support for an effort to topple Saddam. On June 17, 2002–two weeks before Dean praised Bush’s “good job”–former President Clinton delivered a speech criticizing Bush for concentrating on Iraq instead of the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

The whole post is quite interesting. From my own perspective, I have to say, I’m less interested in what Dean thought then than in what he’d do with the war on terror in the future. He’s said some encouraging things about that — but if, in fact, he’ll bend with the wind from the Democratic base on these issues, it’s troubling.