Soapbox

Astute readers will notice that I’ve added two heretofore unprecedented changes to this site. First, I have added an image to the main template. Secondly, that image is linked to another offsite page.

What incredible event has transpired that brought this change about? I discovered Howard Dean’s campaign for presidency. Firstly, Dean is only a “contender” in the upcoming political war because of the support of people on the internet. When I first read that he’d raised $7 million dollars in campaign funds, and that most of that money came from individuals, not corporations, and largely through his website, I thought it was some kind of elaborate hoax. I’d never even heard of Howard Dean, even though I realized later that I did see his float in the recent Pride parade downtown Minneapolis.

Blogs are a big part of Dean’s campaign, and (in my opinion) you don’t get much more grassroots than blogs. http://www.blogforamerica.com/ is the main one, and I’ll probably also be following http://www.minnesotafordean.org/ too. (Where I read about the pride parade.)

I more or less agree with Dean on every issue. His state (Vermont) was the one that recently passed the same-sex marriage law. He stood against the war on Iraq, and isn’t afraid to say so. But I’m not going to say anything else. You should read his take “On the Issues” for yourself.

3 Replies to “Soapbox”

  1. Have you seen the Kucinich v. Dean comparison table? It turned my lukewarm support for Dean into lukewarm support for Kucinich… at least on the issues. I do think Dean is running a better campaign so far, and I’m really excited to see how the internet grassroots will play when the primaries are over, no matter who wins the nomination. And I’d certainly vote for Dean over Nader (and Nader over Lieberman…)

  2. yeah, I don’t know. I kept my blog entry pretty positive… mostly because I think it’s important to really keep support like this positive in general. But I do have several reservations.

    And of course there will be better candidates out there. The question is whether they have a fighting chance. And reading about Dean’s situation, all the support, the amazing funding, it was like a ray of sunshine in an otherwise politically cloudy day/decade. Reading about Kucinich is nice, I do agree with his politics a tad more than Dean’s but it doesn’t make me hopeful that he really has any kind of shot in hell. (of course, there is some question how much of that is just his website looking crappy in comparison to Dean’s, or how much of it is that a google search for his name yields about half the number of results as one for Dean’s.)

  3. Nah, Kucinich really doesn’t have a shot in hell, much as I’d love to believe otherwise – he’s a proper progressive rather than the wishy-washy moderates the Democratic party seems to be head over heels with these days. However, I’m a registered Green; shots in hell are not well integrated into my political universe.

    I think it’s important that true progressives like Kucinich make strong showings in the primaries, though, even if they don’t win – it helps keep the centrists in line. Unless maybe we need to worry about a Kucinich/Dean split in the angry liberals allowing Gephart or someone to take it. I don’t know. The game theory will make my head explode without reams and reams of poll data.

Comments are closed.