To those of us now facing the situation in which the Democratic party is offering us a choice between insider elites who voted to support the war out of political convenience, and who don't really stand for much of anything but their own careers, or Howard Dean: we have a problem.
If Dean loses, then we are in an apparent position wherein we have to sacrifice almost everything we stand for by supporting a candidate who has no real relationship to us.
This is the problem: the Democratic Party may really be two parties. Or, in other words, Dean may in reality be a 3rd party candidate. If the primary contest shows that one of these raging amoral elitist careerist insider whore types gets the nomination, then we are faced with the fact that the Democratic party may NEED us, but the Democratic party really does'nt REPRESENT us.
It's some food for thought. Maybe what we, the Dean base are, is a 3d party base, defined by a better knowledge of national and international issues than many Democratic party voters, defined by a secular outlook or a tolerance of secular people, defined by a notion of civil rights that includes gay people (try to get Edwards to support gay rights, yeah, right), in other words, a base defined by modern progressivism.
What do we do then? Keep playing with the Democratic party, which consistently sacrifices our goals and views for the political convenience of ultra-rich elite insider careerists like Kerry, or for politicians who wish to pander to the "typical" Southern voter, like Edwards?
It can't keep on like that forever.
Sooner or later the people who are currently supporting Dean are going to rate representation in a national political party. Resolving this issue will take more than this election season, but I think that a fine first step is threatening the viability of a non-Dean/war-whore Democratic candidate in the general election sufficiently to motivate that candidate to take a serious, committed, and honest position on the issues we care about, in line with our views on the matter.
There is no other way to get power in party than by taking it ...