About a month ago I gave $25 to the Chris Dodd campaign, and added support for Dodd to my Facebook profile. The reason is that he started to be extremely vocal about getting us out of Iraq right away, and also started to make waves about it in the Senate. Unlike Bill Richardson, who has the same approach to Iraq but the worst campaigning style in history and a tendency to sell out domestic Democratic principles, or Dennis Kucinich, who is an elf and a flip-flopper on reproductive rights, Dodd is right on basically all the issues (I hate his national service proposal, but I'm sure it would be a legislative non-starter). He's showing it now by placing a hold on the completely unconscionable bill to retroactively immunize telecom companies for working with the Bush Administration to illegally wiretap American phones and computer networks, and he may get some more money from me for it, depending on how much this Vancouver trip winds up costing.

I'm not the only one to fall under the sway of the senior Senator from Connecticut -- he leapt from 2% to 7% in the latest Daily Kos straw poll, and got some public support from Kos himself. This has yet to translate into real world polling support, however, as Richardson's online support eventually did. I have to wonder if there's still time for Dodd -- Richardson broke through into double digits after the bloom was off his online support rose, and he's still there in some polls. With any luck, his pushback on the telecom thing will be enough to break him into some mainstream attention, or at least get him more free airtime on Sunday mornings and in the horribly structured "debates." I'm not prepared to say I'll vote for him yet -- he may not even be in the race anymore once it gets to Wisconsin -- but he's the only candidate that doesn't have a big strike against him in my book, and maybe the only hedge against me writing in Al Gore.