But as Charlie Cook, a political analyst, pointsout, winning the nomination requires prodigious fundraising and some measure of backing from the party's powerbrokers.
It arrived with much hype - almost every major newspaper has devoted column inches to the launch and to the fact that heartstrings had been successfully tugged (apart from Charlie Brooker writing in the Guardian who states that anyone who cries at this is "literally sobbing IQ pointsout of their body").