The Howard Dean Presidential Campaign hit the Catskills in force this month. This came about the time that I learned that George Bush and his security detail had taken over Buckingham Palace and turned most of Central London into a Republican controlled "Occupied Zone". This appalling news was enough to convince me that it was the time to turn the slogan "Regime Change Begins At Home," into something more than a sticker on my office door. So two weeks ago Charlie Laurence, our resident British hack, and I went down to the Dean Campaign "Meet-up" in Woodstock to have us a "look-see." There were about 25 people - an assortment of local retirees, Democratic Party activists, Bobo Boomers, and young artists, all of them white - crowded into a back room of The Bread Alone Café. Not a bad turnout for a town with a population of 5000.

"Meet-up" is an Internet network that usually serves to introduce singles or pet lovers to one another. But it has been used by the Dean Campaign to enable his supporters to find each other in what has become a national experiment in spontaneous self-organization. Our Woodstock "meet-up" was only one of hundreds of that occurred across the US with some 135,000 participants. The November "meet-up" succeeded in signing on large numbers for the Dean "cyber organization" that now has about 514,000 subscribers and contributors.

Our own "meet-up" began with a announcement by Perdita Finn, the Chairwoman, that "as of now, we are the Democratic Party in Woodstock..." This was something of a surprise for supporters of Congressman Dennis Kucinich - the favoured candidate of leftists and the Greens - but even more so for local Clinton loyalists. This institutional coup d’état was in line with the Dean’s program of "taking back the Party - to take back the White House- to take back the Country." Clearly the Dean Campaign has not only targeted George Bush and his conservative coalition, but also the Democratic National Committee - which is managed by Bill and Hillary Clinton’s man, Terry McAuiffe. McAuiffle’s idea of how to run a national campaign is to keep to the political centre on issues and run hard after the Big Money. Dean’s idea is to move to the left and to seek out small contributions in amounts that add up to a staggering $26 million - with an average contribution of only 77 dollars. To beat George Bush in November, Dean needs two million contributions of $100 each, and he’s counting on finding enough Americans who are ready "to borrow 100 bucks, if need be, just to see the last of George W."

In a little over eight months, Dean has moved from being a marginal candidate who’s main claim to fame was that he’d been the Governor of the "People’s Republic of Vermont" to the Democratic front runner who now leads in the northern primaries - leading Congressman Dick Gephardt in his home state of Iowa and Senator John Kerry in his neighbouring state of New Hampshire by some 10%. Cut from the same Preppy cloth as George Dubya’s father, his success is testimony to the durability of our old Yankee elites, but is due to something else than his patrician manners. A "progressive centrist" who offers a programmatic mix of fiscal conservatism, social activism and liberal internationalism, Dean succeeded like no one else in tapping into the intense anger felt by the Democratic party base over the stolen 2000 election ; our unilateral invasion of Iraq and the conservative assault on the social programs of the New Deal and the War on Poverty.

But angry rhetoric on these core democratic issues is now available elsewhere as all the Democrats have borrowed from the Dean hymnbook. The true secret of the Dean Campaign lies in his use of the talents of veteran dot-comers like his campaign manager Joe Trippi, to enable his supporters to organize their own campaign network and find his organization on the web where they identify themselves to Dean - rather than having his national organization expend precious resources on finding them. But of course, in order for this to work, people must first want to be found.

Howard Dean finds them because he’s the unlikely beneficiary of a political revolt that’s larger than himself - even if it tends - like users of the Internet generally in the US - to be "too white, too upscale, and too Northern." This last part is perhaps the important bit for 2004. The Dean campaign with its decentralised organization marries the Internet to a political awakening of Northern Protestantism. Dean has mobilized that old "social gospel" that has propelled every major movement for social reform in the last century. And this has an evangelical energy about it that rivals that of the Southern Protestant fundamentalists who are the core of Bush’s base. George Bush can talk of Wilberforce and Locke all he wants, but their shades watch over Howard Dean.