Three Four years ago this month I moved from the Utah desert to Burlington, Vermont, where I took a job as a web writer/blogger for the Dean campaign. My account of those months, which will dredge up some good and bad memories, was published today in The Believer.
Here's an excerpt:
Somewhere in that five-minute drive across the autumn streets of Moab, Bush took the 2000 election. Matt and I drank glumly at the bar until it closed. We had been robbed by Big Money. We wanted a fight.
About that time, a New York company announced plans to build a thousand-dollar-per-night luxury hotel on a mesa just outside of Moab. It was to be called Cloudrock, a name that dripped with fake Native American spirituality and back-to-the-earth opulence. Here was Big Money incarnate.
But this foe was not as insurmountable as the president of the United States, the Florida secretary of state, or a partisan Supreme Court. If we couldn’t keep the bastards out of Washington, well, at least we’d keep them off of the mesa. All the anger and powerlessness Matt and I felt about the election, we channeled against Cloudrock. And so began the curious odyssey that would eventually land me startlingly close to the control panel of the first insurgent political event in a generation: the presidential campaign of Howard Dean.
Read the whole story and let me know what you think.