Frank Rich is a wise and often brilliant man. And he has found the most intriguing and enlightening ways of mixing arts and culture in his weekly column on the front page of the Times Sunday Arts section this year.

Tomorrow morning, he publishes perhaps the most insightful piece yet on the Dean campaign.

First, he brushes aside all that crap the baffled beltway bosy come up with to explain (away) the guy's appeal:

I am not a partisan of Dr. Dean or any other Democratic candidate. I don't know what will happen on Election Day 2004. But I do know this: the rise of Howard Dean is not your typical political Cinderella story. The constant comparisons made between him and George McGovern and Barry Goldwater — each of whom rode a wave of anger within his party to his doomed nomination — are facile. Yes, Dr. Dean's followers are angry about his signature issue, the war. Dr. Dean is marginalized in other ways as well: a heretofore obscure governor from a tiny state best known for its left-wing ice cream and gay civil unions, a flip-flopper on some pivotal issues and something of a hothead. This litany of flaws has been repeated at every juncture of the campaign this far, just as it is now. And yet the guy keeps coming back, surprising those in Washington and his own party who misunderstand the phenomenon and dismiss him.

Nice. But that's not the point of the piece, that's just clearing the decks to open an intelligent discussion about what is actually happening here.

He compares Dean's use of the Internet to FDR harnessing the power of radio with his fireside chat, and Kennedy with his live debates and then live press conferences. In both cases, the medium in question had been around for years before one politician figured out how it make a force out of it. And of course the old guard was right there heckling them until the final moments. And today . . .

The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television's political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie "Singin' in the Rain," where Hollywood's silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. "The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool," intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches. "If you want to be a Deaniac," ABC News's Claire Shipman said this fall, "you've got to know the lingo," as she dutifully gave her viewers an uninformed definition of "blogging."

Heeheehee. I sure do enjoy that kind of writing. And he always seems to be light years ahead of his peer group. Why can't the big publications lure in more people like him?

Typically I excerpt here, and two or three good nuggets are all the piece really has to offer--you'd be wasting your time following the link, unless you really crave everything you can get on the subject. This one is captivating start to finish, wouldn't cut a line of it if I were editing. Do yourself a favor and read through the whole piece.

But just in case you're not sold yet, here are a few more nuggets, out of context, but hopefully luring you in for more:

Dr. Dean's irascible polemical tone is made for the Web, too. Jonah Peretti, a new media specialist at Eyebeam, an arts organization in New York, observes that boldness is to the Internet what F.D.R.'s voice was to radio and J.F.K.'s image to television: "A moderate message is not the kind of thing that friends want to e-mail to each other and say, `You gotta take a look at this!' "

That's a really interesting idea. I've written here several times about how Dean tends to bore me on TV when he first gets going--and never seems to do too well on those quickie sound bites. It's only after several minutes that I start to feel something rise up--he really sneaks up on me gradually. But on the web he comes through instantly, almost every time.

And this is a really interesting idea, too, about the asymmetry that may lie ahead this fall:

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O. ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

I am ashamed to say, I had not even thought about that. Seems pretty obvious in retrospect--guess I just wasn't thinking that far ahead. Now I'm really getting excited about the year ahead of us.