I avoid politics because the strong smell of cynicism and Machiavellian maneuverings that reek of sulfur. In fact, some of my biggest distaste for the current Bush administration has to do less with policy, and more with the inhuman realpolitik of his regime. For Bush, it’s about winning, not about people.

For those reasons I, like a lot of other people, have been thinking maybe Howard Dean wouldn’t be such a bad guy to be president. The “fighting centrist” acts like he just wants to do the right thing. And in American politics, that’s a rare and possibly mythical beast.

Then I see the Howard Dean for Iowa game. Cyncism with a Norman Rockwell face.

Let me say up front, the guys that did the game for Dean are smart and generous fellows. I know that they see video games as a way to do something positive in the world, and they’ve poured their intelligence in a wide range of interesting products—from games, to web sites to academic papers. So, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ll assume in the rush to simply get the game out the door (the developer’s constant lament) they didn’t have time to sit back and realize what they had done.

If you can, check out the game. In 10 minutes or so, you’ll get the basic ideas. Starting with yourself, you plant Dean operatives on a map of Iowa counties. You do the Dean’s work in a series of three mini-games set in a cute cartoon version of this important political battleground. Either you run down pedestrians to hand out a Dean tract, you canvas door-to-door avoiding dogs and influencing caucus-goers or you simply flash a Dean sign at the appropriate moment to catch the attention of as many passers-by as possible.

The score in the game is simple—the more people you recruit to the Dean side, the better.

So that’s it. You recruit, and while you do it, you get little pro-Dean messages flashing around the corners or your screen.

And in a few cute minutes of play with a simple set of games, politics is revealed for what it is—a raw game of numbers. The Dean game shows that his campaign is no different than Bush’s. No different than any other in recent memory. The political process has been hijacked by analysis and planners looking at demographic data and figuring out how to build landslides of word-of-mouth influence. What Dean says doesn’t matter in this game, nor in the real world. It’s simply the calculus of mobilization. Get enough waves of volunteers recruiting volunteers and you have the perfect Amway pyramid—multi-level marketing your way to the presidency.

As games, the games are simple probably as a result of the amount of time available to create them. Unfortunately, beyond the novelty factor, the games have boiled out anything fun about playing a video game out and left the raw work of clicking around the screen in their place. In the game world, not only does Dean have nothing to say, he just wants you for your labor. It wont be fun, but earn enough points, or people, and we can win.

Sure, it might seem like much to place this at the feet of a simple game—an amusing marketing gimmick to push the Dean brand. After all, the game didn’t set the political playing field, it just reflects it. But by focusing on the ugliest side of politics, the cynically statistical game of voter mobilization, the Dean for Iowa game tells us everything we need to know about the campaign. It’s about votes, not about issues. It’s about recruitment, not about people. It’s about building momentum, not about being right. So, knock on your neighbors door and tell them to play the game.

I’ll probably still vote for Dean when the time comes. But it wont be with any gusto. And it’s too bad. Beneath the inhuman gears of the Dean political machine I bet there is some sense of political idealism, a desire to do right and make the world a better place. But I just think it stinks that politics in this country is not about issues, it’s not about rousing speeches and visionary leaders. It’s about collecting votes with a mechanical efficiencies, computerized system of influence gathering where the only thing the politicians need for your besides your vote are your fingers clicking away on the keyboard of their machine.