I was a very early Deaniac. In fact, Howard and that community got me to vote for the first time in my life (albeit for Kerry, but I digress). For a middle-aged AfricanAmerican/Cherokee expat woman, voting, and voting rights should have been automatic. But they weren’t because I didn’t trust the authenticity of the American political system, and the politicians that seemed to infest it.

Dean came along when I was extremely angry at Bush (I had just finished writing a book about his malapropisms called ‘Bush in Wonderland’). As a regular, non-wonky, non-techie person, I didn’t care that Howard didn’t do most of the blogging himself. I cared that he did what he said he would do, that he lived his life in accordance with his beliefs, and his actions spoke a whole lot louder than his blogging needed to.

He was very clear about being uncomfortable with computers in general, and not really knowing what he had unleashed in Americans hungry for authenticity…

I say all that to note that regular folks, who aren’t the tech savvy, or the politics-savvy, for that matter, might care more about other things than whether the candidate had some grand blogging scheme when he started out. I certainly did, which is why I’m chair of democrats abroad japan today - and Gov. Dean is head of the DNC, put there and appreciated by the growing grassroots that supports him: whether he blogs himself or not!

dailykos posts that help widen the view of the Gov.:

Howard dean Flattens Wolf Blitzer on Abramoff Scandal

The Dean Misinformation Campaign