Pundits have made much of Dean's "firey" presentation style. To put some meat on the rhetorical bones, Park University Professor and former journalist Andrew Cline offers detailed rehtorical analyses of candidate speeches at his Presidential Campaign Rehtoric site. Find an analysis of Dean's June 23 Presidential Announcement Speech here. An example:

Our President and too many in Washington are giving away our future so that we pass to our children not a flickering flame of freedom but the chain of insurmountable debt. [Alliteration of the letter "f" should be avoided for positive references. It is much more effective for negative references in which the "f-word" is implied.]

No parent would do this and America must not do this. [Americans understand government in terms of the conceptual metaphors "a nation is a family" and "a government is head of the family." Liberals and conservatives have very different moral visions of family and, thus, very different moral visions of government. Re: Moral Politics by George Lakoff, U. of Chicago Press, ISBN# 0-226-46771-6.] ...

... American audiences usually react well to big-picture speeches that invoke cherished myths and cultural values. Dean skillfully uses both. This speech does not have the grandeur of the Kennedy inaugural address (from which Dean quotes), but it tugs just as surely at the emotions. This prose is remarkably free of obvious (and grand) tropes and schemes found in abundance in the Kennedy inaugural. Instead, Dean chooses to deliver the power of myth and cultural values in plain-talk to create the ethos and pathos of this speech.