Yesterday, I participated in the modern equivalent of the Roman “bread and circuses:” the political rally. At such events, large numbers of like-minded people gather together and cheer and yell while a candidate they will all vote for anyway delivers a vague, but uplifting, stump speech.

Standing in the center of a throng of white-collar professionals fighting over free tee shirts and union workers holding placards with simplistic anti-globalization slogans would have been funny had I not been so invested. After all, the stakes really could not have been higher.

Since January of 2000, we have seen environmental laws gutted, social spending eviscerated, the richest get tax cuts while states and cities face bankruptcy, and dissent and protest curbed in the name of patriotism. Insane Christian zealotry has been installed as the unofficial state religion, and science and common sense is eclipsed by ideology and dogma. The respect of the world has been traded for fear and resentment.

We – the 10,000 or so who braved the humidity and rain – flocked to the plaza of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in large measure out of our frustration and concern for the wrong direction the country has taken. We look at the Bush Administration and its awful domestic policy and its wreckage of foreign affairs and see a situation that drastically needs changing.

The rally at the Art Museum brought together thousands of people from all races and ages and vastly different backgrounds. We were there to see and support the candidate who can, and hopefully will, defeat George W Bush in November.

As of right now, John Kerry is polling in a dead heat with Bush. Each has hovered at around 48% for the last several months. But polls are blunt tools, a sampling of a few hundred people out of a hundred million potential voters.

Right now there is great unease in America. Millions of children are without health care or access to decent education. Millions of jobs have been lost, despite the small bump in the spring. The gap between the rich and the poor is expanding. Most of all, almost 1,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq, in a war that did not need to be fought, was sold to us with lies, and is now shaping up to be the biggest foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.

If John Kerry can tap into that unease, there would be no beating him. If he could connect with the millions of disenchanted Americans who’ve given up on the electoral process, the legions of single mothers, racial minorities, and young people would outweigh anything the opposition could muster.

In their negative assault of attack ads, television appearances, and sound byte warfare, Republicans have tried – with a disappointing degree of success – to paint Kerry as a “flip-flopper” or “too liberal” to damage his appeal with voters. But no one should mistake a nuanced and sophisticated opinion for waffling, or support for the environment and civil rights as being too liberal.

The fact is, with his silent gagging of safe-sex information, his crushing of family planning programs abroad, his savage assaults on green laws, his obscene legislative gifts to donor industries, his deficit-happy spending, his eagerness for preemptive war, and his single-minded and dogmatic religious fanaticism, George Bush is the candidate most outside the American mainstream.

While the chanting of “most important election of our lifetimes” may be exaggerated, this election really is pivotal. It will determine whether the government trusts the people or works in secret, whether judicial appointees are backward knuckle-draggers or competent jurists, whether our country will move toward renewable energy or remain shackled to petroleum, whether America can look beyond its prejudices or tie discrimination into the Constitution.

That sense of urgency is motivating the Democratic faithful and alienated Republicans, even as the masses in the middle and the disengaged poor remain unconvinced. John Kerry has a little over two months to spread his message and invigorate the electorate.

But for me, there is no choice. There is simply the road back to sanity – sane leadership, sane policy, sane budgets, sane choices. John Kerry has the intelligence, the experience, the attitude, and the skill to lead our country. He must be the next president.