Howard Dean, the Blogging Politician

A lot of people have been talking about Howard Dean, the current Governor of Vermont, who is currently running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He’s got himself in the news again recently, as Professor Lawrence Lessig, a big name in the blogosphere, gave him a guest spot in his blog while Lessig goes on holiday. This won’t be a big departure for Dean, as his main campaigning tactic has been to avoid the standard campaign memes and run a grass-roots, Internet-based campaign - indeed, he famously already has his own blog.

Not that he posts to it much. Only the occasional post is from the Governor, with the rest from his campaign staff. (At least, the recent ones are - I gave up trying to navigate the unnecessarily cumbersome one-post-at-a-time monthly archives.) Which is understandable, but it does detract from the whole “Wow! Our Next President has a blog!” meme. And it suggests that, perhaps, Dean’s blog might just be a fast-updated news page by any other name.

But to hell with such sour grapes. The Guardian has an interesting piece on Dean which emphasises just how much US politics differs from European politics:

In almost any other industrialised country, Dean’s campaign platform would sound boringly middle-of-the-road. In Bush’s America, it verges towards the liberal extreme. He thinks the US should not have invaded Iraq and he wants a public inquiry into the propaganda campaign that preceded the war, and believes the burden of running the country should now be shared with Nato and the United Nations. At home, he is calling for the Bush tax cuts to be reversed and for the money to be spent on healthcare, education and paying off the national debt. He is arguing for a government-run health insurance scheme available to all Americans - a radical proposal in a country with 42 million people uninsured.

The world needs the US to see a modicum of sense, and if that means Dean getting the Democratic Party nomination, well, if I had a vote it would be his already. I just hope he won’t turn out to be another Dukakis.