Other Mac Weekly commentators have argued that the Macalester Democrat-voting audience should vote for Wesley Clark because he can get elected or Howard Dean because he has the best platform. Both of these arguments had their strong points, but I think that both missed an essential point: it doesn’t really matter who wins the primary. We politically-savvy Macalester students know that there are significant differences between Democrats and Republicans and that the Republican Party is controlled by a dogmatic ultra-conservative branch. We know that another four years of the Bush Administration will whittle the Bill of Rights down to the second amendment, destroy whatever shred of credibility we might have had in foreign countries and further concentrate power and money in the upper class while those of us who don’t have family connections search in vain to find a job.

But many voters aren’t very politically savvy. They don’t care about issues unless they feel personally affected by them; they feel that if they are happy with the way things are on election day, the best thing to do is to vote for the incumbent. If they want change, they vote for the challenger. This keeps them from having to think about issues except at the end of an eight-year presidential term. How these people decide whether or not they are happy is often a complicated issue, but it generally doesn’t have much to do with the incumbent’s ideological position unless that position directly attacks their own.

In other words, the outcome of the next presidential election does not depend on the outcome of the democratic primary at all. The democratic candidate could be Al Sharpton or Dennis Kucinich and still win if this portion of the electorate feels that Bush has made a huge enough mess of Iraq and the economy.

Does this mean we don’t need to vote in the primary? Maybe it does. Because of the way the primaries are organized, key states like New Hampshire, Iowa and Illinois will get to whittle down the list of candidates long before we in Minnesota have the opportunity to vote. On the other hand, if the result of the primary really is of little importance to the outcome of the election then perhaps the primary offers a wonderful opportunity to make ideological statements within the party. So I encourage you to go out and vote for the candidate that you think would be the best president, not the best candidate.

As for me, I am strongly considering voting for Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich has no chance to win the primary. But he is the only one of the democratic candidates who has promised to end the American presence in Iraq if he is elected. He plans to do this by giving control of military operations and lucrative contracts to the United Nations. Not surprisingly, this rather remarkable and unique proposal was not responded to in any way during the debates I have watched. The candidates who consider themselves “serious candidates” have refused to respond to or attack Kucinich, Sharpton or Braun, a move which I am sure is designed to further marginalize them. But I was very impressed by Kucinich’s performance during the debates, and I now consider him to be the best representative of the left wing of the Democratic Party from an ideological standpoint. In contrast, I was very disappointed by Howard Dean, the candidate who actually has taken on this role. Dean did not make any worthwhile and diametrically-opposed-to-Bush proposals.

The secret of Dean’s success lies not so much in his actual positions (although he is very liberal, and has the radical idea that everyone should be able to get healthcare) as in his strategy. Dean started early, presented himself as a left-wing outsider and managed to capture the hearts of “West Wing Democrats,” a segment of the party which is probably larger than many pundits think, which has a definite ideology and which felt ignored during the last election. Because of the obvious parallels between Dean (doctor, governor of Vermont) and the fictional Jed Bartlett (economics professor, governor of New Hampshire), Dean had a certain measure of free advertising. In fact, I first heard about Dean from a friend who said he would be the “closest thing to having Jed Bartlett as president.”

Dean capitalized on this small advantage by starting to campaign very early. I first saw him in the capacity of an unofficial candidate for president on some CNN talk show in April 2002. At that point, I was impressed. His call for universal healthcare and straight-forward demeanor had me hooked. In fact, I kept strongly supporting Dean until I saw him in the first debate. I had heard the conservative media portray him as ultra-liberal, so I expected him to really mix it up with the other candidates. I was disappointed when he said pretty much the same things as the other “serious candidates.” These were all things that I knew and agreed with, but I would have liked the candidates to talk a little about what they planned to do. The only candidates which stood out for me as unique were Carol Moseley-Braun (the only woman), Joe Lieberman (almost a Republican), Kucinich and the perennial Al Sharpton.

Despite my disappointment, I agree with most of Dean’s positions, and I hate Bush. If Dean wins the primary, I will even contribute to his campaign. But when I go to vote in the primary, I am going to vote to end U.S. presence in Iraq.