Coming Soon to a Blog Near You

I have been trying for the past three days to think of something to say about the end of the Dean campaign, but everything that I have written has felt forced, or petty or just plain dull. I'm working out a post on theme that "all politics are local" and Churchill's "This is not the end" speech, but I haven't yet been able to get it all out on paper, so watch this space, as they say.

In the meantime, I am posting an email that my wife sent to a colleague that captures the essence of what I believe happened and has to happen next:

I think I'm coming around to the view that apathy is the wrong answer. The amazing thing about the Dean campaign was only sort of about the candidate (a very good man, I believe, who was doing this for all the right reasons and was a great governor in VT, but to be brutally honest probably a flawed campaigner on the national stage) -- it was really about the grassroots involvement and the new sense of empowerment for so many people. I think if that gets lost, then we as a nation and the Democrats as a party will really have lost something. . . . In a nutshell - the idea is to start small and build big, which is what the religious/conservative right did when they hijacked the Republican party. If they can do it, we can too.

In the same vein, I recommend Joan Walsh's article in Salon.com [link]