as has been used very successfully by Howard Dean is the exact sort of thing that Tony Blair became leader of the Labour party to crush.
The result of Blair's power mad brand of politics is that the british people are very much alienated from the politicians they elected to serve them, and voter turnout is plummeting over here as people are increasingly fed up with having to choose between a parties whose policies they abhore and parties who stand very little chance of obtaining power. The thing that British politics could really do with at the moment IMHO is a Dean style challenge to the madmen in authority. THAT is what Blair is wetting his pants at the prospect of.
I cannot see Blair wanting a strong democrat in the whitehouse when he is so much closer ideologically to the PNAC.
Maybe this article explains it a bit better why Phoney B:liar is running scared?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1120733,00.htmlDean's bid for the Democratic nomination is more than just an electoral campaign. It has all the attributes of a movement - a bottom-up surge of like-minded, motivated people who have discovered they all have something in common and are now mobilising in order to act on it. Around the country strangers are meeting in towns and cities in their tens and twenties, donating money in $10 and $20 bills and coming away with not just posters and badges but "to do" lists. "Participation in politics is increasingly based on the chequebook, as money replaces time," argued Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. Dean has managed to get people giving time and money.
The fact that Dean has become the focal point for this energy matters. His winning the nomination would be roughly the equivalent of Ken Livingstone taking over the Labour party. Not that Dean has the same politics as Livingstone. But, broadly speaking, they stand a similar distance to the left of their party establishments and - recent reconciliations notwithstanding - are equally loathed by their party bosses.
His insurgent candidacy marks the first electoral awakening of the growing ranks of the disaffected and disenfranchised - a group not confined to America but spread over most of the western world. Over the past decade, they have protested, petitioned or just grumbled in each other's company. But the one thing they have not managed, until now, is to make a decisive difference at the ballot box. Instead, they have chosen between voting for parties they no longer believe in, or parties they know cannot win, or just not voting at all.
In the Dean campaign we are gaining a glimpse of the organisational methods that could bond the disparate and disenchanted at a local and a national level, whether in Germany against Schröder's economic reforms or in Britain against Blair's foreign policy and tuition fees. It does not answer the question as to whether activists should stay in those parties, form new ones or join others. But it does indicate how, wherever they end up, they might mobilise large numbers of people effectively at the polls.http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=29655
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