Well, my little jaunt across the blogosphere has led me past at least half a dozen entries like the one atWhiskey Bar, "Mr. Dean's Army."

His analysis suits the standard theory on the leftish end of the blogosphere. (That would, of course, be most of it.) Dean is the true voice of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, his fundraising is fantastic and will connect with the great unwashed, and the fundraising from that segment of society will restore the great advantage in fundraising that the Democrats lose by being the party of the people.

Except... except...

First, he forgets, or fails to mention, the dirty secret of Fat Cat Fundraising in the US. As stated in a NYT Editorial (sorry, only the abstract is now available for free):

In getting behind the badly needed drive to end soft money as a device for buying candidates and favors, the Democrats knew they would have considerable catching up to do to broaden their base for the new campaign world of limited hard money. The one category the Democrats led in was among fat-cat donors, with the party garnering 92 percent of the contributions of $1 million or more in 2002, the last year soft money was permitted. No wonder Terry McAuliffe, the Democrats' soft-money maestro, is emphasizing an urgent new direct-mail effort to enlist many more smaller donors.

Secondly, Dean does represent the left-wing of his party. He's Buchanan with the gun in his left hand, and he's a guaranteed ticket to defeat at the poles. No candidate has won recently without a run to the center, and those who are looking to Dean as their white knight are behaving as unrealistically as I would be if I were to gaze starry-eyed into the night sky and dream of a Scalia run for office.