For as long as I've been conscious, presidential politics has been about raising
money from rich people and corporations and then buying television ads
designed to confuse everyone else. But Howard Dean's campaign is utterly
different; in fact, it's the most exciting thing to happen in American politics in my
lifetime. Look at the numbers: he's raised $40 million, and the average donation
is well under $100. For that kind of money, no one wants a special favor. They
want an end to special favors.
Beyond the money. Dean's campaign has managed to turn politics back into a
participant sport. People gather every month in Meetups in church basements
and high school cafeterias (those who may never have had the experience of
participatory democracy -- and that's most of us -- should definitely visit one of
these) and there they write letters to voters, plan small events.
Pundits have made a lot of the Internet, and indeed Dean's people have used it
well. But the way they've used it best is to allow real people who never before felt
like they had any stake in the process to become deeply involved. This is radical
democracy, far more radical and more important than the particular positions
Dean is staking out. And the fact that it comes from a radical center, not the left
or the right, makes it all the more important.
Dean's a good guy. Not the second coming, not Martin Luther King, not
Abraham Lincoln, but a good guy. In Vermont, every kid in the state had access
to good health care by the time he was done. That shouldn't be such an
accomplishment, but in our America it is. Environmentally, he did
straightforward, sound things: conserved a lot of land, made real efforts on
energy conservation. Budgets were balanced, but not on the backs of poor
people. And his plans for the nation seem sound too. Like most of his
Democratic rivals, he could be expected to at least do all the obvious things, and
some of the not-so-obvious.
 |
|
|
|
But that's not what makes him so exciting.
It's that his campaign offers a glimmer of
hope for breaking the ice jam in our political
life, the one that's kept the Congress from
doing anything -- anything -- about topics like
global warming. There's a whole list of issues
even well-intentioned Washingtonians can't
address because of the politics-as-usual
gridlock: Social Security, universal health
insurance, job flight. In a post-Dean universe,
some of that might change. Because the
money and support for getting elected would
come from people, not from PACs.
I've been volunteering for Howard Dean since
sometime last year -- sending money, going
to New Hampshire to give speeches to environmentalists, writing letters to voters
in Iowa. It's been an enormous amount of fun. But what keeps me motivated is
that -- for the first time in my political life -- I sense the nearly unlimited
possibilities. In a $25 revolution, anything is possible. Even democracy.
