A dictionary definition of the term “iconoclast” says that it refers to “someone who challenges or overturns traditional beliefs, customs, and values.” By those standards, W. Leon Smith definitely chose the right name for the small-town Texas weekly newspaper he launched seven years ago.

You’ve probably never heard of Leon Smith, but the odds are pretty good that you’ve heard about his paper. The Iconoclast pole-vaulted into the national spotlight on September 29, 2004, when it had the audacity to endorse John Kerry for president.

The Iconoclast is based in tiny Crawford, Texas (pop. 705 as of the 2000 census, though that number has now grown due to an influx of new residents that include Cindy Sheehan and a certain individual by the name of George W. Bush.) And when The Iconoclast published its editorial endorsement titled “Kerry Will Restore American Dignity”, the locals didn’t take too kindly to what the paper had to say during the deeply divisive election cycle of 2004:

The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda.

Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry, based not only on the things that Bush has delivered, but also on the vision of a return to normality that Kerry says our country needs.

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Kerry has remained true to his vote granting the President the authority to use the threat of war to intimidate Saddam Hussein into allowing weapons inspections. He believes President Bush rushed into war before the inspectors finished their jobs.

Kerry also voted against President Bush’s $87 billion for troop funding because the bill promoted poor policy in Iraq, privileged Halliburton and other corporate friends of the Bush administration to profiteer from the war, and forced debt upon future generations of Americans.

Kerry’s four-point plan for Iraq is realistic, wise, strong, and correct. With the help from our European and Middle Eastern allies, his plan is to train Iraqi security forces, involve Iraqis in their rebuilding and constitution-writing processes, forgive Iraq’s multi-billion dollar debts, and convene a regional conference with Iraq’s neighbors in order to secure a pledge of respect for Iraq’s borders and non-interference in Iraq’s internal affairs.

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When examined based on all the facts, Kerry’s voting record is enviable and echoes that of many Bush allies who are aghast at how the Bush administration has destroyed the American economy. Compared to Bush on economic issues, Kerry would be an arch-conservative, providing for Americans first. He has what it takes to right our wronged economy.

The re-election of George W. Bush would be a mandate to continue on our present course of chaos. We cannot afford to double the debt that we already have. We need to be moving in the opposite direction.

John Kerry has 30 years of experience looking out for the American people and can navigate our country back to prosperity and re-instill in America the dignity she so craves and deserves. He has served us well as a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and has had a successful career as a district attorney, lieutenant governor, and senator.

Kerry has a positive vision for America, plus the proven intelligence, good sense, and guts to make it happen.

That’s why The Iconoclast urges Texans not to rate the candidate by his hometown or even his political party, but instead by where he intends to take the country.

The Iconoclast wholeheartedly endorses John Kerry.

<!-more-> When that story hit the wires, it went national in minutes and global in hours. Leon Smith’s little small-town weekly newspaper, with a grand total of 920 copies sold each week by subscription and on the local newsstands, suddenly found itself in the center of a firestorm of epic proportions.

Local residents were up in arms. Subscriptions were canceled. All three newsstands in town refused to carry the newspaper any more. Most advertisers pulled their ads at once; those who didn’t were boycotted. Hundreds of angry letters and emails poured into The Iconoclast’s offices, threatening to overwhelm Smith and his three-person staff. (Some of those letters and emails threatened to do a lot worse than just overwhelm them.) Not everyone in town turned against Smith’s paper; like the rest of the country at the time, Crawford was sharply divided. But the majority of residents in President Bush’s adopted hometown were seriously disgruntled.

Smith’s associate editor disassociated himself from the paper’s endorsement of Kerry, but he and his other employees refused to back down. They expected to be driven out of business by the vitriolic anger of Crawford’s citizens that resulted from the editorial statement they published that day in September. But a funny thing happened on the way to the bankruptcy court: bloggers came to The Iconoclast’s rescue.

Some say it started with some diaries on DailyKos; others insist it started on Democratic Underground, or on any of a hundred other progressive blogs that picked up the story and ran with it. The blogosphere being what it is, there’s no way to know for sure. But once the ball started rolling, that didn’t really matter anyway.

Bloggers everywhere wrote impassioned posts and sent out action alerts to their followers. Emails and letters supporting the newspaper’s position started pouring into Crawford. Online purchases of subscriptions skyrocketed. Other Texas newspapers took notice. The mainstream media chimed in and carried the story far and wide. And within a matter of weeks, The Iconoclast had gone from being an imperiled small-town newspaper to an internationally-known entity.

Smith stuck to his guns back in 2004, and he’s still sticking to them now. While he’s no left-wing bleeding-heart liberal - Smith describes himself as a conservative Democrat who supported Ronald Reagan - he is still every inch the classic Texas iconoclastic gadfly and his ongoing support of speaking truth to power has never wavered. Instead of going under, The Iconclast has overcome adversity and gone on to prosper. What started out as a small-town weekly newspaper now attracts readers and writers from any place on earth that has an internet connection, including regular contributions from London-based Indian journalist Kapil Komireddi.

In an extended commentary published this past week titled “The Long War of John Kerry”, Komireddi has this to say about the man whose name put a small-town newspaper from deep in the red-state heart of Texas called The Iconoclast on the map when it bucked the odds and courageously endorsed him for President back in 2004:

Perhaps no other prominent politician in modern America has been as terribly mauled by propaganda as Kerry. McCain felt the pain of Karl Rove’s smearing only in 2000, almost 15 years into his Senate career. Per contra, John Kerry became a target of Richard Nixon in 1972, when he was a candidate for Congress. Kerry, a 29-year-old political abecedarian, was making life miserable for Richard Nixon, then the world’s most powerful man. Nixon was so disturbed by Kerry and his antiwar campaign that not only did he send his own son-in-law, Ed Cox, to Lowell, MA, to campaign against Kerry but also stayed up on the election night to see Kerry lose.

Yet Kerry endured. In 13 years’ time, he returned to Washington as a Senator. In 32 years’ time, he would come unbelievably close to achieving an unprecedented feat: unseating a wartime president. There is something about John Kerry’s enduring, fighting spirit which skips and eludes, and will always elude, the sensationalist headline-seeking punditry.

The complexity of John Kerry cannot be simplified in a column. John Kerry is a good man, a great man, perhaps one of the greatest leaders in modern American history. He can dazzle you with his knowledge, but he can also bore you with detail and amaze you with inconsistency. When at a recent Senate hearing, Condoleezza Rice, defending the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, smugly told Kerry, “Elections don’t mean democracy, but I’ve never seen one begin without an election,” Kerry responded: “Actually, the American democracy began with a revolution, not an election.” Rice, a former provost of Stanford, was left speechless.

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In the Senate, Kerry’s remains an influential voice. On many issues, Kerry has been a solitary soldier, but a solider who never gives up fighting. Perhaps the country, and the world, will benefit more by having Kerry in the Senate than in a meaningless race for the presidency. His aim, as he put it, is to end poverty globally, strengthen America’s global leadership, provide universal healthcare, and protect the environment. But above all, it is to put an end to what he sees as a senseless war in Iraq. He recently re-introduced a private member bill designed to do just that. Over three decades ago, standing next to Coretta Scott-King in Washington, D.C., in a speech which truly scared Richard Nixon, a young John Kerry told a gathering of tens of thousands of antiwar protestors: “This is not the struggle of one day, or of one war. It’s a struggle, and an effort, and a sacrifice, and a contribution, which we make for the rest of our lives.” He may have lost the presidency, but the long war of John Kerry goes on.

Senator John Kerry has never given up on fighting the good fight and standing up for what is right for America rather than just what is politically expedient in Washington. Neither has the-little-newspaper-that-could, The Iconoclast. And informed citizens everywhere can take heart to know that both will still be with us for many years to come.