My name is Gabriel Wachob, and I was recently elected as a delegate to the California State Democratic Party Central Committee from the 21st Assembly District.

I am writing to strongly urge the DNC to elect Howard Dean as DNC Chair.

Howard Dean has demonstrated an ability not only to turn out an amazingly effective grassroots effort, and raise more money than any presidential challenger in a primary, he has shown that he is *still* committed to making the party succeed even after his own campaign ended.

No other primary contender put as much effort into making the Kerry/Edwards ticket succeed as did Dean.

From a first hand account of going to the 2004 DNC, this quote really struck home, as it the author is talking about people like me (emphasis added):

I grabbed a cab with another Boston-bound traveler. He was Alex De Ocampo, President of California Young Democrats and a Kerry delegate.

I asked Alex when he first started supporting Kerry, and he thought it was about a month before the Delegate Caucus (where delegates are elected by local supporters) in February. I thought about the people I knew in California who were elected as Dean delegates after a year of hard work, but aren't coming to Boston because Dean suspended his candidacy before the California Primary.

The chart here is atrocious. If you don't look closely, you'd think Dean raised slightly more money than the other candidates. In fact, he raised MORE THAN THREE TIMES what the next candidate (Kerry) raised. One might also notice that it skews the comparison between Bush and the Democratic candidates.

There are four more graphs with similar skewing.

My copy of the picture (for posterity) is here.

I speechless. I've emailed the Dean Rapid Response team to correct it.

Wow!

The Dean campaign announced the formation of an advisory panel for policy issues surrounding the Internet. And the list of members is impressive: Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, Dewayne Hendricks to name a few.

Its about time these issues got addressed seriously at the presidential level. I'm waiting for other campaigns now (of course, they'll have to pick from the rest of the experts - Dean's got many of the best already!).