Dick Gephardt deserves Howard Dean. In a sense, he created him.

Interesting Democratic race analysis.

MoveOn, the left-leaning, antiwar online organization, polled its members on their presidential preferences, and a clear plurality of voters favored Dean. Just as important, however, MoveOn also asked its voters which Democratic candidates they could enthusiastically support if those candidates won the nomination. Dean ran first here, too, with 86 percent backing, but the pro-war candidates fared notably less well. John Edwards came in fourth with 56 percent, Gephardt fifth with 53 percent and Lieberman eighth with 42 percent. (Al Sharpton ran ninth: MoveOn voters clearly thought him an implausible president, and Lieberman, an implausible Democrat.) The surprise was John Kerry, who ran a strong second with 75 percent. MoveOn voters -- a significant, if not necessarily representative, sample of liberal Democrats -- seem to have established a hierarchy of pro-war candidates. At the bottom is Lieberman, the most conservative candidate in the field; then Gephardt, the architect of the party's support for Bush's war; then Edwards, a not very critical supporter of that war; and finally, at the top, Kerry, who managed both to vote for the war and criticize it simultaneously. Some might call that incoherence, but of all the Democrats, Kerry is probably the best able to win support from all quadrants of the party. In message and manner, Kerry often still fails to connect with his listeners. But if he can put his own house in order, he's the candidate best positioned to unite a party that's not been this angry at itself since 1968.