[I sent the following to a dear friend who spent two weeks in Iowa in 2004 working for the Dean campaign. I share here with all of you because I think it's important to remember where we've been as we plot our course for the future.]
Four years ago tonight on the political calendar... it got away from us. I wonder if you don't think back to that night in Iowa and tear up still. It seemed like we had it in our hands, then the weirdness of the Iowa process followed by the vapidity of big media snatched it right away.
Try as I might, I just can't find the passion in me to get behind any of our candidates this year the way I did for Howard. I'm sure you feel the same way. Plus you have so much else on your plate.
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I guess everybody takes away their own lessons from these things. Mine, even in my new and improved mindset, are bleak. This is a time of profound ignorance and fear for the American people. We are rich, dumb, shallow, and afraid: of each other, of outsiders who want to live among us, of outsiders who want to smash our institutions. We don't respect the tolls of war because so few of us have ever had to pay them. We don't respect the rest of the world because so few of us have ever seen any of it. I, at least, never wholly understood how thoroughly unprepared our fellow Americans were to hear a guy stand up and just tell it like it was. Capturing Saddam won't make us safer? That's crazy!
And, of course, four years later, the heavy majority agrees that he was right. They just don't credit him for it.
I have my ideas about what it will take to save this country, but they range mostly in the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" spectrum of prognoses, the details of which aren't really germane to my thoughts here. I just sit here now, reflect back on that time in Iowa when you were there and I was living vicariously and excitedly through you, hoping and believing that we could turn the country around. Perhaps, when history is finally written, it will turn out that the Dean movement was the pivotal moment in the resurgence of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. I hope so. Regardless, though, I will never stop being proud of you for all you did up there. Thank you so much for all you did then. I'll never be able to describe how much it meant to me down here.
Tonight, when the returns come in, join me in lifting a glass to Howard, will you?
I want to rededicate this to all of you who hit the frozen streets four years ago in support of Howard Dean, and raise a toast tonight to the friendships made and the movement born. We have a long fight ahead of us this year against those who would keep us down -- as Jay Farrar once wrote, "kindler, gentler.. at their feet." Then there's a permanent fight for progress beyond that never stops. What happened four years ago, before the results came in and the scream got distorted all over Big Media, was important. I honestly believe it changed the way politics works in this country. Let's drink tonight, to Howard, and to ourselves. He deserves it and so do we.