Mick,

you are making assumptions about me. I am not new to the party, but a lifelong Democrat. Granted, my life has not been THAT long, but I've been registered Dem for 20 years now. I think your analysis misses something very important. To you, the petulance of progressive democrats produced Nader's run. To progressive democrats, the petulance of the party establishment did. I agree with you, actually, but only because I knew Gore well enough to know he was more progressive than the image he tried to sell in order to "capture the center." Gore lost partly because he couldn't sell a soft-democrat message to enough of the base.

I also understand the progressive position, which is this: We now have a party that decides in advance who will win the nomination, a media that toes the line, and a style of mind control ("X is electable, y is not") that takes democracy away from people. A week before Iowa, when Dean had huge leads everywhere, the party establishment said "I think we need to wait and see how this turns out; it could be a long one." A week after Iowa, when Kerry had the lead, it was "everyone else should drop out of the race and line up behind Kerry." I haven't seen such a naked display of Party favoritism in all my time in the party.

Only in such a situation, I think, could a Kerry (who is, essentially, a liberal Bob Dole: eminently electable, experienced, war hero, yadda, yadda, except free of charisma) get a major party nomination after the REAL Bob Dole took his party down. I think the party getting its ass handed to it in 2000 and 2002 is largely the result of its relentless marginalization of more progressive democrats and its concentration on well-connected losers. Remember Gray Davis? He was a real Kerry type. He was, of course, electable--but people regretted it almost instantly. That's what I fear a Kerry nomination will be like.

You may think that progressive Democrats are irrelevant and therefore experienced politicos are right to ignore them.   My answer is your answer: remember Nader? That may not have done progressive Dems any good but it didn't do centrist Dems any good either. And it was the fault of both groups. To say that it's all the progressives' fault and that if they toed the line the party's centrist strategy would work misses the point: a lot of Democrats are tired of that strategy and tired of the politicians it produces. If the Party continues to put up Kerrys, those who dislike his reliance on quid pro quo favors to industry will continue to put up Naders. I have said I'll vote for Kerry, but I still predict that he will lose.

That's why I'm for Dean, not because I'm an -iac of any kind, but because Dean is an actual centrist who does not rely on all that poisoned special interest money. He also took different positions from Bush on the war, the Patriot Act, and No Child left Behind, which Kerry did not. So I think Dean actually can win. I think if Dean gets the nomination there will not be a challenge from the left, and we will have a fighting chance. I think Kerry's a dead end for the party. Once democrats find out more about him they'll snooze til election time, and we'll be lucky to wake them up then.

Having said all that, it's really not very relevant here. You brought it in from another thread that was probably best left to lie. Here I was pointing out something else: a lot of democrats like me who have voted but not paid close attention to primary results are realizing the extent to which THAT system is chaotic and needs fixing. This may be related to the other stuff, in that Dean is a candidate who in many people produced enough passion that they'll examine the system. But it's essentially a different set of issues.

What Charley says is a perfect case in point. There is no way to double-check who voted for whom? Does that sound like a good idea? Am I a juvenile whiner (surely the subtextual message of Mick's last post) to point out that it's not?