Well, today is the first day of Moveon.org’s virtual primary. If you’re a member of their mailing list, take a few minutes to research the candidates and pick your favorite. After giving the issue some serious thought, I put down my vote for Howard Dean.

All things being equal, I like the positions of Dennis Kucinich above all the other candidates. As JoeF pointed out, he’s definitely the most progressive of the bunch :

Kucinich is doing something that a liberal hasn’t done in a while…he’s running a truly progressive campaign, with a well thought out and well articulated point of view. We, as progressives, should support that.

Many, many people bitch about the DNC moving towards the center. But then they go and vote for a guy who’s willing to move towards the center (like Kerry, Gephardt, or Dean). If you really want to force the DNC to move back to the left, you should be supporting Kucinich. He’s the only one with a strong progressive agenda, and the more support he gets, the more the DNC will have to come to terms with the unhappiness most of us have with their centrist moves.

Although I agree, I think that’s only half the equation in a case like this. Just as important as the candidate’s views (at least in a case where most of the candidates are pretty good) is whether the candidate can get elected and how willing he/she is to comprimise in order to get some work done.

As much as I like Kucinich, he’s so outwardly liberal that he’ll turn off a lot of moderate voters. Even in the one-in-a-million chance that he could get elected, I have serious doubts about his ability to enact his agenda. At least one or both of the houses of congress are going to be Republican after 2004. If the senate president doesn’t know when to hold em’ and know when to fold em’, then it’s not gonna do anybody any good.

So that’s why I like Howard Dean. I don’t agree with him some of the issues, but I haven’t been this excited about a candidate since Al Gore whooped up on Bush in the 2000 debates (Seriously, watch them again and you can count how many questions Bush actually answers on one hand). The thing that really sold me on Dean was this quote :

“White folks in the South driving with Confederate decals on the back of pickup trucks ought to be voting with us, not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance either.”

That one says more about Dean’s inclusiveness than a thousand conerned speeches about “the black vote”. One of the big problems that liberals face is that we’ve been labeled as insincere and elitist by the conservative press. I think there’s definitely something to it, but when given the choice between politicians who talk down to minorities and politicians who openly screw minorities, the choice is pretty clear. Dean has shown that he can cut through the perception of the liberal snob and really appeal to moderates.