"I'm a democrat," my friend John said last night over soup. "What say do I get in this?"

None except our voices (and our listservs, and our calls to our party reps). Here's mine.

I want some wings on the old donkey. I'm for Dean.

Donnie Fowler is a personal hero of mine - he ran an extraordinary national field campaign for Gore, and led the Clark campaign through its extraordinary first months. He's also a beautiful writer - especially when it comes to building a new grassroots. (I really hope Dean engages Fowler to do some of the hard work of developing a structured, supported, state-focused party.)

This is to say, that the choice of endorsing Howard Dean wasn't automatic. If you live in a small state long enough, you know someone well enough that you know they aren't perfect.

But I've been reading some of the thoughts on the DNC chair, and here are mine.

This moment in the history of our country is so much bigger than unanswerable speculation about who will hire the best ad company. Its our first act, collectively, as democrats to say what we believe in after last November's election.

We must choose a person that represents our strongly held, unambiguous beliefs about the rights and responsibilities of American citizens. We must elect someone who we can all look to articulate some of our hopes at a time we can feel strangled.

For example, I believe that mass scale active political deliberation is essential to democracy. I am willing to sacrifice for fiscal responsibility. I am a conservationist. Big agriculture is not the future of the party, but small and medium agriculture can be. Health care is critical to small business growth. I believe a woman has the right to control her own body. I believe we must transform our dependency on oil into independence through innovation. I believe the United States can have a transcendent role in building a true international community with moral suasion. I don't mind spending time with people who don't believe these things. But Howard Dean has said these things, and acted on these things, unambiguously, for his entire public life - and given me and millions of others courage to say them in our own words.

We use political parties to aggregate our hopes and dreams. The point of the Democratic party is not to win for its own sake, but to win because we represent some of the best traditions of civic life in human history. One of my hopes is to always be courageous in political life.  As a party, we need courage at the core - and the ability to inspire it in others. Just today I got an email from someone whose uncle decided to run for a rural texas local board spot because he got the email from Dean today.

Dean speaks in a blunt, straight way - he's funny, and he has a remarkable ability to listen, directly, to the people speaking to him. He's absolutely clearheaded about the fact that no political act has no cost. Every funding decision we make means there's another we can't - every choice is tied to every other choice. He's also very clearheaded about the difference between being a leader and demanding absolute fealty. He's happy to welcome right to lifers into the party, but that doesn't mean he's about to tone down his own strong views on family planning and a woman's freedom.

The single defining feature of Dean's political life, for me, is that he demands so much of the people around him, be they the people of Vermont, or his campaign, or this country. "The vote," he often says, "gets you a C. If you're going to be a citizen you've got to do a hell of a lot more than vote."

The national party means a lot more than it did 30 years ago. People move, on average, between every 4 and 10 years - change jobs 5 or more times in 30 years -- so the only way we are going to build a vibrant, local, community-based political life is if that life is actively supported by the national party. We need a party that sends us into our local party life - that inspires us to go work for that precinct chair whose been making all the calls for 20 years without much help - that inspires us to use our own words when talking to our co-workers about what we believe.  

I was going to sit back and watch this election go by - I'm just a damn ex-hack, right? But his speech today inspired me again. So I guess I'll go out and try to find some phone numbers for my reps.

Lets get some wings on that donkey.