Dean in Austin, the Note

Drawing 3000 people to a campaign event this early in the season is extraordinary. Must have been the power of the new blog. Ok, not really. In any case, there’s a detailed first-person writeup of the rally on the excellently named Burnt Orange Report.

Equally important—no kdding—is this blurb from ABC‘s Note:

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Howard Dean might win both Iowa and New Hampshire; Howard Dean is the only major candidate in the race who talks like both a governor AND a real person from outside Washington; Howard Dean is really using the Internet to fundraise and organize (It ain’t just hype … .); Howard Dean connects regularly with Democratic audiences in a way that the others can do only sporadically; Howard Dean has a long record of policy thoughtfulness and a capacity to connect it to the real lives of real people that governors do best (and is, dare we say it, Clintonesque) ; and he evinces real anger at George Bush’s polices.

The dirty little (not-so) secret of political strategists of both parties is how hard it is to get people interested in, and emotional about, politics. Howard Dean is doing that, and he is bringing new (and young) people into the process. In a crowded field, that is a good thing.

The Note is, as the Trent Lott bigot eruption showed, enormously influential. Let me get out ahead of the curve for a moment and declare that the Note is the David Broder of the coming generation. I mean that in a postive, center-of-political-consensus kind of way, not a negative, mealy-mouthed-apologist-for-the-mighty kind of way. If the Note thinks Dean can win, Dean can win. And since the major knock against Dean is that he’s a “longshot” (or lately “unelectable”), well

Filed under: politics/2004