Monday, December 15 was an extraordinary day for Howard Dean, very possibly the pivotal moment in his bid for the presidency - but not for the reasons suggested by conventional wisdom. Twenty-four hours earlier had come the sensational news of Saddam Hussein's capture, and the pundits wasted little time in drafting political obituaries for the good doctor from Vermont. Nice try, was the tenor of their patronizing dismissals, but we all know an earth-shaking event like this will give President Bush more than enough ammunition to squash a clean-cut little Internet insurgency from the land of Ben & Jerry's.

Then, when Dean came out fighting and said that, while he was delighted Saddam had been caught, he had not changed his position on the war one bit, the pundits smugly shook their heads all over again. So did Dean's fellow candidates John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman. He's out of his depth, they all murmured. No foreign or national security experience, and it shows. Isn't it a pity his mouth moves faster than his brain? Lieberman clearly thought he was delivering the coup de grace when he said that if Howard Dean had his way, Saddam would still be in power and slaughtering innocents - including, perhaps, large numbers of American citizens.

If this was a debacle for the Dean candidacy, though, it certainly didn't look that way on the campaign trail. Dean was in Los Angeles that day, and the first order of business was a major foreign policy address in which he tackled the Saddam issue head-on. While he hoped the capture would make life less hazardous for U.S. troops on the ground, it did not change the fact that the administration "launched the war in the wrong way, at the time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at unbelievable cost." It did not end the daunting security and stabilization challenges facing U.S. forces in Iraq. It did not bring the country any closer to defeating al Qaeda, or finding Osama bin Laden, or furthering the worldwide containment of weapons of mass destruction.

In short, he said, Bush's war had not made America any safer.

Dean's audience was no bunch of radicals and slouches. The Pacific Council on International Policy, co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and attended by a glittering array of academics, businessmen, religious leaders, and elected officials with more than a passing knowledge of the subject-matter at hand, gave him a warm reception. Not only did they appreciate his remarks about Saddam but also his plea that America rebuild the international consensus and regain its moral authority as a global example to be respected and emulated, not feared and loathed.

One eminent attendee who had not endorsed Dean's candidacy professed to be "dazzled" by his command of the issues during the question-and-answer session, particularly when he gave a complex five-part answer on U.S. relations with China. Others noted that Dean's is a profoundly centrist vision on foreign and security policy, not some left-wing screed; it could only appear radical if you took the Bush policy of unilateralism and unprovoked, pre-emptive war as the new norm.

Dean's next stop was another potential nest of vipers: lunch with the Democratic National Committee which, to believe some of the recent press coverage, is in a state of high agitation over the prospect of his nomination, fearing a McGovernesque rout in the general election next November. Again, the reality was starkly different. Two Latino members of Congress, Xavier Becerra and Hilda Solis, endorsed him with lavish praise for the hope he had offered the demoralized ranks of the party.

"Thank you, Howard Dean, for taking up the torch to be our hero," Solis said, with the sweetness of a schoolgirl in love. Terry McAuliffe, the DNC chairman, could not be so overtly partisan - officially, he is backing nobody until primary season is over - but he barely contained his enthusiasm as he talked about the party's new electronic databases listing supporters, swing voters, the issues each of them cares about, their phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Far from being skeptical about Mr. Dean's unorthodox, decentralized, Internet-driven campaign methods, McAuliffe sounded very much as though he had already factored them into his calculations. Joe Lieberman might not have approved, but the event had the distinct feel of a coronation.

With Al Gore now officially cheerleading for Dean, the endorsements have come thick and fast - several key unions including the painters and the service workers; 27 members of Congress including the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Elijah Cummings; the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; the collected Democratic leadership of Puerto Rico; the governor of New Jersey; the mayor of Baltimore and dozens of state and local officials around the country. On the day after Saddam's capture, TV and radio outlets tried to stir the pot over Dean's anti-war position, but in their newscasts they also moved straight from President Bush's news conference to Dean's speech at the Pacific Council - effectively according him the status of rebutter-in-chief for the first time. Without entirely realizing it, the media had inaugurated Dean as de facto leader of the opposition.

The bizarre truth is that the more the pundits bash Dean and predict the imminent collapse of his candidacy - as they have been doing from the moment he first emerged as a major force on the eve of the Iraq war - the more they betray their profound lack of understanding of the movement he has unleashed. They haven't grasped the extent of his grassroots organization and the radical way he is reshaping the whole notion of political campaigning, in the Democratic Party and beyond. And they have either failed to appreciate or have woefully underestimated the sheer excitement he is generating, not only within his party but also in a whole new constituency of supporters being politicized for the very first time.

Punxfordean.com

To understand the Howard Dean phenomenon, you have to break out of the usual paradigm of candidates running for office and look beyond to people like Kimmy Cash. Cash is a 28-year-old punk from Ontario, California, who first heard about Howard Dean at an anti-war rally back in February. After meeting him in late September - by crashing the VIP section of a Dean event at Union Station - she decided he was the coolest politician she had ever come across, and determined right there she was going to help him become the next president of the United States. Her mission: To politicize America's two million or so punks, most of whom are young, disaffected, and would never normally dream of voting for anyone. The way she figured it, if America's punks got their act together - decided, in her words, to stop saying "fuck the system" and tried instead to change it - they would be numerous enough to tip the entire balance of national politics.

The night she got home from Union Station, she set up an unofficial website called punxfordean.com. Soon, she was spending her weekend nights roving the punk venues of the Inland Empire - places like Gotham and Lyrics, located in and around San Bernardino - to distribute flyers and spread the word. And the message caught on. Spectacularly.

Three months on, she has a staggering 13,000 volunteers in all 50 states, Howard Dean tattoos on both her forearms, and is busy planning a nationwide series of concerts to get both bands and punk fans committed to the cause. Everyone who attends the concerts will be required to register to vote, and she intends to have registration forms on hand for anyone who has not done so. "Nobody's ever tapped into this demographic before, and it kicks ass," she said. "People are signing up all the time, and I'm getting 60 or 70 new e-mails each day from people who say they love it."

What is remarkable about Cash's campaign is that she is doing it entirely on her own. Nobody is telling her what she can or can't do. Nobody is paying her for her efforts. The Dean campaign loves her because she is signing up new recruits from a subculture politicians have never previously bothered to address. Punk bands love her because she is creating a new outlet for their music - a compilation album of underground bands is going on sale through her website next month under the title Taking Back America. This is not just about a candidate; it is a way for people to reconnect with politics and feel they can actually have a stake in public life after decades of disillusionment, disinterest, and a growing sense of powerlessness.

That, of course, is Howard Dean's message - to fight corporate greed and political corruption and government by special interests - but it is also built into the very bones of his campaigning strategy. People have made much of his use of the Internet, but for him the Internet has not been an end in itself so much as an organizing tool - a way not only to identify and keep in touch with his supporters, but also to empower them. Dean volunteers don't just take instruction and send money into campaign headquarters; they make their own organizing decisions, set up their own events, and come up with their own ideas.

A screenwriter named Jon Felson, for example, recently decided to put together a promotional DVD for Dean with a group of friends from film school. The result - largely a montage of Dean speeches, with a short introduction - pleased campaign headquarters enough that it gave its blessing for them to mail the DVDs out to interested supporters at $2.50 a pop. Recent USC graduate Becca Doten has taken it upon herself to organize students across Southern California, encouraging them to wear buttons on their backpacks, carry campaign literature with them, set up tables at campus events, throw Dean parties, and get supportive student bands to stage shows. Meanwhile, investment advisor Annette Rojas is in charge of the local chapter of DeanCorps, a public service volunteer organization that does not actually campaign, but rather takes the admirably lofty view that politics needs to be about more than simply running for office. As expressed by a T-shirt slogan at a recent event helping to build low-income housing units with Habitat for Humanity in the Harbor Gateway section of Torrance: "Someone's gotta clean up this mess."

Howard Dean does not just love his volunteers, in other words; he has also set them free. That decision has, in itself, rewritten the rules of political campaigning, and it has also created an unprecedented sense of exhilaration.

"This gives me so much energy," marveled Rojas. "This is not me in my ordinary life." Mike Meurer, a veteran volunteer on many political campaigns who runs his own telecommunications and marketing company, remembers his amazement when a volunteer coordinator from campaign headquarters in Vermont came out for a couple of months, and told members of the L.A. For Dean chapter to stop asking him for campaign strategy. "You don't understand," the coordinator, Aaron Holmes, told them: "You are the campaign." "It was the most stunning statement I've ever heard uttered by any campaign," says Meurer. "But that is the mentality."

Grassroots L.A.

In Los Angeles, it's easy to see the exhilaration in action. The Dean volunteers here are uncommonly well organized - partly because California is on the cutting-edge of Internet trends, and partly because of an abundance of people with relevant professional skills, say, in music, or video production, or PR. In March, an introductory meeting and video presentation for local volunteers at a Universal CityWalk restaurant turned into a noisy instant strategy session, in which the 60 participants all underwent an epiphany similar to the one that had hit Kimmy Cash. They were thrilled by Dean's straightforward, unalloyed way of expressing his opinions; by his ability to address their concerns; by his accessibility and apparent commitment to democracy as a living process - not just a slogan - and, above all, by the hope that he had the guts, the populist instincts and the broad-based appeal to send George W. Bush - as Dean himself has put it - "on a one-way bus back to Crawford, Texas".

Unlike the other Democratic candidates, who either ignored the early inquiries of would-be volunteers or invited them to cough up $2,000 a pop to attend ritzy fundraisers, Dean used his website to respond to anyone who approached him. He's also done his best to make personal contact with his base - either by showing up at events himself, or by making himself available via conference call. Like the Bush Republicans, Dean understood that no contribution was too small to be worth considering - especially because the donors would then be personally invested in his success. Unlike the Bush Republicans, however, he has not relied on a spin-doctored message carefully doled out in pre-scripted soundbites. Rather, he has had the audacity to believe that he can truly connect with people at all levels.

It may be wildly ambitious, but it is also proving incredibly successful. The L.A. volunteers got into the spirit of the campaign so quickly that when they organized the first statewide meeting of volunteers in May they completely forgot to tell Rick Jacobs, since named California campaign chair, that they had arranged to hold it at his house. Shortly after that, they were out tabling at farmers' markets, setting up a regional council with chapters all over the Southland, and - in their most recent initiative - sending ambassadors across state lines to canvass in Arizona and New Mexico.

The growth of the L.A. operation has reflected the national picture. In December 2002, Dean's campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, had just seven full-time staff members. One month later, 400 volunteers had signed up at his website. That number now exceeds 500,000 and is continuing to grow fast. In essence, Dean and his Internet-savvy campaign manager, Joe Trippi, threw a giant roll of the dice. Their only hope as outsiders, they realized, was to sow the seeds of a populist movement across all 50 states, bypassing all the usual channels of big money and corporate influence and relying on ordinary people to both finance and staff the entire operation.

Rick Jacobs explained that it was a perfect blending of candidate and message: "Joe Trippi's genius was to say: 'Do not put a structure over these people, because if you do you will crush them.' The trick is, if you keep this decentralized, you keep these people energized. They are still a huge part of this campaign. They are the backbone in some ways."

Five days before Dean's most recent L.A. trip, the L.A. For Dean committee was congratulating itself on the fact that it had not only obtained detailed precinct maps from the county registrar's office in Norwalk, but had already started blocking out areas in red pen where precinct workers had divided households into definite supporters, maybes, and definite nos. Two days before his trip, Kimmy Cash was in Arizona setting up new chapters of Punks For Dean, while 30 volunteers were banging nails and squirting caulking guns with Habitat for Humanity in Torrance, with another 35 on the waiting list for the next opportunity. Usually Habitat asks its volunteers to show up at 8:30, but the DeanCorps was there more than an hour earlier. Jon Felson, the screenwriter, said gleefully: "All we have to do is imagine George Bush's face on the end of every nail and we'll have this house up in no time."

Good Evening, Fellow Traitors

On the evening of Dean's visit, the candidate and his volunteers came face to face at a packed fund-raiser at the House of Blues, generating the sort of energy not usually seen on political campaigns until a week or two before election day. Volunteers, as usual, drove the event; everyone worked for free, and on short notice, from the press representative to the film editor who put together an up-to-date montage of Howard Dean images. Rob Reiner emceed, and the headline acts included the Bangles and the Folksmen, the spoof trio of Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean, featured in their film A Mighty Wind. Together, they created something not unlike the Berlin cabarets of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a show where for a couple of hours at least, it seemed safe to skewer the turbulent politics of the world outside; to laugh, dance, and appreciate the full absurdity of the screaming heads on Fox television.

"Good evening, fellow traitors!" McKean began. "I don't know about you, but I sleep a lot better at night knowing that Ann Coulter hates my guts." The Bangles reminded the audience that the band's hit "Walk Like an Egyptian" had been banned from the radio by Clear Channel Communications after 9/11 for fear that it might offend someone - a tidbit that, in this crowd, seemed truly surreal. Dean himself came on in rolled-up shirtsleeves, beaming from ear to ear, and worked the crowd to perfection. Admittedly, these were true believers he was addressing, but, as Al Gore showed, it is possible to screw up even with them.

"We're going to have a lot of fun at George Bush's expense tonight," Dean began, and he was true to his word, promising the crowd a very long vacation for Bush, Ashcroft, and Cheney starting in January 2005, and coming out with a few choice one-line zingers. "It used to be Republicans cared about money," he said, " but now they're spending ours, not theirs, they don't seem to care any more." He explained how Americans were feeling increasingly distrustful of corporate employers and fearful for their job security. He bemoaned the fact that schools were being neglected while prisons were filled with petty offenders having their lives ruined at public expense.

As he had shown earlier before the Pacific Council, his overall message was hardly radical. He put in a plea for small businesses, and said renewed fiscal responsibility had to replace Bush's credit-card spending - sentiments right down the middle of the political road.

The connection between speaker and audience was nevertheless palpable, and the language never less than trenchant. This was far better than anything John McCain managed during his brief populist insurgency four years ago, which enjoyed only a shadow of Dean's organizational network, and better even than the big rallies for Arnold Schwarzenegger, where the candidate was simply too manufactured to be a match for Dean's spontaneity and righteous indignation. In short, as he reached out for what he called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" and urged fellow Democrats to stop feeling embarrassed about who they were, Dean felt and sounded like a winner. Clearly, the party hierarchy is beginning to think so, too.

Whether he actually wins, in the primaries or next November, is of course another matter. This is California, not a swing state like Arkansas or Florida where the real battle will be joined, and besides there is simply no knowing where the Bush administration's raising of the terror specter might lead next. That said, the grassroots fire he has ignited across the country is a genuinely novel development, one that deserves to studied and emulated far beyond the lifetime of this campaign. If the Howard Dean machine doesn't win the White House back for the Democrats next year, it seems doubtful anything else will.