WASHINGTON, 24 January 2004 — It is true Howard Dean may not make a great presidential candidate.

He is a little odd. He seems prone to mood swings — sometimes too self-contained, sometimes too loose, as when he almost blew a gasket in Iowa the other night.

As a presidential candidate, he is a work in progress, at best. And there is no denying it. He has been angry, indignant, childlike in his insistence on screaming that the emperor has no clothes; so unbending in his political argument that often even people who agree with him can’t stand the sound of his voice.

This may not be what you want to see in a presidential candidate. But it is exactly what I see when I look in the mirror. Dean has spoken for me. Whether I ever get to vote for him or not, Dean has captured the real frustration in me, and I suspect millions of people, as citizens of a country gone nuts.

He is the only one who ever voiced the level of anger and alienation I’ve felt since the launch of the war in Iraq.

For that, I thank him. He pulled me back from the brink. You can’t be truly alienated from the political process if there is someone running for president on your platform of indignation.

In psychobabble-speak, Dean validated my sense of betrayal and, by extension, my sense of patriotism; because when I look in the mirror, I don’t just see an angry guy — I see an angry, patriotic American guy.

We don’t have to go through the bill of particulars about the betrayal. But maybe we will anyway. At this point, it seems possible that Dean won’t be going through them much anymore. After losing in the Iowa caucuses, he has toned down his speech in an effort to broaden his appeal. He seems to be listening more to advisers. This may make him a better candidate, but it won’t make him a better citizen.

The angry Citizen Dean was right on all counts:

Bush launched the war on Iraq without evidence that Iraq played any role in Sept.11 or in any other attacks against the US.

Bush’s government virtually suppressed intelligence from within its own agencies warning us that there was no hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Bush insisted on this massive expenditure on this unnecessary war while the economy was in the tank.

Bush thumbed his nose at the United Nations and our European allies when our own intelligence community — and probably our own State Department — knew that their doubts about the war were justified.

Bush insisted on a second massive tax cut in two years, primarily for the wealthy, in the midst of this vastly expensive and needless war.

The capture of Saddam Hussein did not make the world safer from terrorism.

Dean has made a strong case against the Bush government’s domestic policies, too. But the point is, he did it first and he did it resoundingly. He said the war was wrong, and he never added a “but....’’ He may never get his party’s nomination. But I wish to hereby thank him on behalf of all the odd, mood-swinging, gasket-blowing patriotic Americans out here.