On June 20, 2003, six Democratic presidential candidates spoke to the Association of State Democratic Chairs (ASDC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Here's my opinion of the field.

It's an entertaining crop. If I could only recommend one speech to sit back and enjoy, it would be Reverend Al Sharpton's. "How has Bush let us down? I don't know where to start. I can't think of any way Bush has let us up!"..."How would I deal with the economic mess Bush has created? I'm probably the best qualified of any candidate. I was born into deficits, I grew up in deficits. I'm even here tonight on deficit spending!" He's a cross between Jesse Jackson and Boondocks. If every candidate had his own TV show, even the Republicans would be tuned to in to watch Sharpton.

Sharpton, however, like Carol Moseley Braun (who did not speak), does not actually appear to be trying to win. The only time he talked about getting the nomination was to make a self-deprecating remark about his ability to win votes. He appears to be running as a way to increase awareness for his voter registration drives, which aim to register working class and poor voters who will presumably vote Democratic.

Dennis Kucinich (Congressman from Ohio) was surprisingly good at the ASDC/DNC event, much better than his forgettable performance in the May 4, 2003, C-SPAN debate. In front of party loyalists, he exuded the charisma of a high-powered TV lawyer, where 10 minutes from the end of the show the suspect is confessing, "You're right. I did it! Lock me up!" The audience loved him, but he seemed oddly unaware of the crowd, as if he was a star actor giving a stellar performance to a television camera. Maybe this is why he hasn't captured the energy and momentum of the less progressive Howard Dean.

Kucinich is the most progressive of the candidates. He is calling for significant cuts in the Pentagon budget (something Howard Dean pointedly criticized him for) and increased spending on education. He promises to cancel NAFTA and WTO, repeal the Patriot Act, and bring the retirement age for Social Security back to 65. He marched in Seattle during the anti-WTO protests. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and led Democratic opposition to the US bombing of Yugoslavia. He did, however, support the resolution authorizing Bush's military response to the September 11th attack.

Kucinich also achieved notoriety for being mayor of Cleveland when it defaulted on its debt. His website explains the default with this excerpt from Cleveland Magazine: "Kucinich refused to yield to bankers who gave him a choice: sell the Municipal Light System [Muny Light] to the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. [CEI] or the city will go into default. The mayor said no." The banks wanted to force privatization of Muny Light for financial self-interest: "Five of the six banks held almost 1.8 million shares of CEI stock; of the 11 directors of CEI, eight were also directors of four of the six banks involved."

When Kucinich refused to back down, the banks refused to roll over the city's debt and instead forced Cleveland to default. It cost Kucinich his reelection, but in the 1990s, Kucinich's liability turned into an asset. Again taken from Kucinich's web site, the May 1996 issue of Cleveland Magazine remarks, "There is little debate over the value of Muny Light today. Now Cleveland Public Power, it is a proven asset to the city that between 1985 and 1995 saved its customers $195,148,520 over what they would have paid CEI." In fact, in 1994 Kucinich ran on the slogan, "Because he was right!" coupled with the symbol of a light bulb to win a seat in the state senate. In 1996, Kucinich was elected Congressman, running on the slogan, "Light Up Congress." And two years later, the Cleveland City Council commended Kucinich for "having the courage and foresight to refuse to sell the city's municipal electric system."

Unfortunately, during the C-SPAN debate, when Kucinich was asked to explain Cleveland's default on its debt, he blew off the question. For his Cleveland constituents, this may be yesterday's news, but the rest of the nation doesn't know squat about Muny Light or CEI. George Will is quoted on Kucinich's web site as (erroneously) calling Kucinich "the only presidential candidate to have presided over the bankruptcy of a major American city." Kucinich feels this quote is unfair, but it is exactly the impression he left with viewers of the C-SPAN debate.

More worrisome for Kucinich, despite his progressive credentials, is that he's not the candidate that's exciting the grassroots. The man with the most active supporters, whether you love him or hate him, is Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. Every time you check the Dean section of meetup.com (http://dean2004.meetup.com), another 10,000 people have signed on to volunteer for his campaign. During the first 5 minutes of Dean's speech to the ASDC/DNC crowd, he got three standing ovations. "The only way we're going to win is to take Bush on, instead of trying to be more like him." The ballroom rocked with applause and cheering every 15 or 20 seconds. Dean has taken the late Paul Wellstone's motto and made it the cornerstone of his campaign: "I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party." During the C-SPAN debates, Dean was ridiculed by the conservative Bob Graham (former governor of Florida), who mocked, "I represent the winnable wing of the Democratic party."

Dean gets his biggest applause for attacking the Democratic Party--even at Democratic Party events. He is attracting the rank-and-file Democrats who are sick of their leadership sucking up to Bush. A lot of people think this makes him a progressive or liberal, but in fact his positions are neither progressive nor conservative nor centrist. They're all across the board.

Dean's positions can be found on his website (http://www.deanforamerica.com) which shows what a mix his politics are. He supports civil unions for gay couples, but is against gun control. He's pro-choice, but supports welfare reform. He's supports tough emissions standards, but also supports the death penalty for "terrorism or the killing of police officers or young children." In addition, Dean was also an outspoken opponent to the invasion of Iraq, but supported the invasion of Afghanistan (as did Kucinich).

As unique as Dean is, Dean is not the most interesting part of Dean's campaign. The most interesting part is meetup.com, a site that allows people with common interests to find one another and organize local gatherings. As of this writing, almost 60,000 Dean supporters have signed up to attend "meetups" to organize support for Dean, compared to 5,000 for the next most popular candidate, John Kerry.

This all emerged with very little direction from the Dean campaign itself. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Online, Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, recalled, "Somewhere in January, I got an e-mail from somebody saying, 'Hey, there's a bunch of people trying to organize these Dean meetups.' I went and checked it out... The amazing thing is we went from 432 [people signed up] on the last day of January to 2,606 on the last day of February, without doing anything."

Instead of Dean directing his campaign, it appears Dean's campaign has been taken over by his own supporters. In an article in Time by Joe Klein, Dean remarks, "But the Meetup folks are the core of our organization out here in California. In New York, they're working to get us on the primary ballot, which is not an easy thing. This campaign is totally decentralized. There are probably 15 or 20 different kinds of Dean bumper stickers, because people in different states decide to print their own." One of those stickers might read, "If the people lead, the leaders will follow."

Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, calls the self-organizing influx of supporters "the strongest insurgency in the history of American politics." Trippi constantly comes back to the same theme. "What we're doing is putting the grass-roots back into politics, putting the people back into politics." In another article, Trippi cites a similar theme. "If television took the grass roots out of politics, the Internet will put it back in."

Some of this is hyperbole, but Dean supporters have found a way to use the Internet to turn an anti-establishment candidate into a front-runner. Pissed off Democrats are using the Internet to take the party back from the leaders. As a note of caution, I think Dean does not realize that meetup.com members represent a limited constituency that does not represent all of America. To quote Joe Klein, "It is young, middle class, white and wired."

In contrast to Dean, the major establishment candidates have stirred little excitement. Three of them spoke at the conference: John Kerry (Senator from Massachusetts), Dick Gephardt (former Democratic leader of the US House of Representatives), and Joe Lieberman (Senator from Connecticut and Al Gore running mate). Only Kerry showed any energy, although that faded halfway through the speech. Joe Lieberman spent most of his speech thanking everybody. The hall was deserted for Gephardt's speech. If the race was between just these three, it would be a race to see who would lose to George Bush in 2004.

Bob Graham (governor of Florida), Carol Moseley Braun (former ambassador to New Zealand and Senator from Illinois), and John Edwards (Senator of North Carolina) did not speak. Bob Graham is running as the conservative candidate and Carol Moseley Braun does not remind you so much of a political leader as, say, an ambassador to New Zealand. John Edwards is a charismatic politician who won his Senate seat in North Carolina running as a centrist. He voted with the Democratic establishment to invade Iraq. To his credit, he spoke eloquently about the "corporate takeover of America" during the C-SPAN debate. This is consistent with his career as a trial lawyer suing and winning large judgments against large corporations--corporations who I'm sure think as little of trial lawyers as Edwards thinks of them.

For people who care about who will be President in 2004, and who find any of these candidates attractive, now is the time to get involved. The hard work is done before the first vote is ever cast. This is your chance.

You can find out more about each of the candidates by googling their web site (http://google.com). In addition, many supporters are organizing through Meetup (http://meetup.com).

Notes for this article: rtsp://12.170.145.134:554/jdrive/ldrive/rwh050403.rm?cloakport=8080,554,7070 ; http://www.kucinich.us/issues/issue_publicpower.htm; http://www.kucinich.us/responses_media.htm; http://press.meetup.com/archived/2003_06_05_index.html; http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,460238,00.html; http://msnbc.com/news/933274.asp?0sl=-31; http://www.bizreport.com/article.php?art_id=4575; http://csmonitor.com/2003/0701/p07s01-woeu.html.