I'm 55 years old, I thought of voting for Eldridge Cleaver in 1968 (I was too young to vote by about 10 days). After the Democrats crammed Hubert Humphrey down our throats at the 1968 Democratic convention. After the election, which Nixon won by 100,000 votes, I realized how self-indulgent that would have been. Sometimes a blow against the establishment is a blow against all the people we say we want to help. There is a big difference between a vote for John Kerry and a vote for George Bush, and no vote at all. The last two stand for keeping things the way they are. The first may not be as much change as you want, but it will be a step in the right direction and it will be a start, and most importantly more people will have health care etc. I guarantee you if you vote for Kerry you will be disappointed, and I also guarantee you if you had voted for me and I had won you would have been disappointed too at some point. But governing in the real world means you can really make things better, dropping out means hope is dead. So thanks for hanging in there! [...] This isn't about electing Kerry, and it wasn't about electing me, it's about taking the country back for people like you, no matter how long it takes!

Over on Tapped, Garance Franke-Ruta thinks this is evidence that Dean isn't really supporting Kerry very fully, and that it shows that Dean wasn't really qualified to be president.

Well, maybe so, but what I was struck by was the apparent honesty of Dean's response (which he made voluntarily -- he was under no obligation to comments on the essay) and the emotional life it reveals, all too rare in a politician. Perhaps Franke-Ruta is right, and politicians shouldn't show their inner feelings in this way, but that's rather a sad commentary on how we expect our elected representatives to behave -- or, maybe we've just grown used to having them that way, because masking their true feelings is the safest path to election and re-election.

In any case, while she may be right about Dean's words showing that he wasn't the right person to be president, I think she's dead wrong about Dean's support of Kerry. What he wrote is precisely the correct way to reach someone who's disaffected (like Naderites and some Deaniacs) and lead them gently back into the system. By underplaying and not browbeating, Dean's words might well convince people who would otherwise sit this one out or cast a meaningless protest ballot that their vote is important, and that they're not ignoring their principles by voting for Kerry. His saying that these voters will be disappointed by Kerry reads true, because my own experience suggests that it's inevitable: I have yet not to be disappointed by my elected representatives in one fashion or another, but I understand that politics is the art of the possible and for that reason grant them large amounts of leeway, something that people perhaps more idealistic than I often have difficulty doing. Dean's words act to help them to do that.

I thought Dean's remarks where both truthful and subtle, which is a combination not often achieved by politicians.