Howard Dean as DNC Chair?

So who should be the new head of the Democratic Party? The leading candidates spoke to state leaders down in Florida, and one man stood out- Gov. Howard Dean. The New Republic calls this "exactly the wrong way to go" in the wake of the 2004 election, but I am intrigued by the idea. Or "idear", as Dean would say...

Dean clearly knows how to build a strong grass-roots organization with national reach. His campaign was truly a new kind of campaign, funded online and spread through "Meet-Up" unoffical campaign events. The passion his supporters had for him as a candidate drawfed any other groups in the Democratic field. There were those true believers, those "Deaniacs" who have stood by him all the way. Watching Dean today on Meet The Press, I was struck yet again by how genuine he seemed, how what you see is what you get. He is "in the moment" like Bush is, like Clinton was and how John Kerry and Bob Dole are not.

He is more comfortable answering "values" questions than Kerry could ever be, couching them in language which makes clear Democrats have values and principles to. Discussing abortion, he said this morning On gay marriage, he points out that he signed the first state civil unions bill in America, and did so to provide equal rights. (Wesley Clark always used to say, imagine you had a gay child- wouldn't you want your child to have the same opportunities as everyone else?) Democrats have a proud history of supporting equal rights, even when politically unpopular to do so. Kerry tried to straddle these type of issues and ended up sounding as if he did not know what he thought, playing into the Bush campaign's caricature of him.

Dean is not so much a classic liberal as he is a populist. I still remember being home by pure happenstance to see his speech declaring his candidacy for president. His catchphrase "You have the power!" was the same then as it is now. He thinks there is enough of a populist base to be sucessful, and argues that the campaign run by Karl Rove and the Republicans (who certainly did not run to the center this time out) proves an election can be won by turning out the base, rather than focusing on the center. At least on the Republican side, anyway. His campaign was run for the true believers, from the bottom up rather than the top down, and he suggests he would run the DNC the same way.

I understand what it is to empower people who aren't in Washington. I think we can't win anymore unless the message is made in the states and then filters up to Washington rather than made at the DNC and then we tell the state parties what to do...

Many Democrats have criticized the DNC for running only a 20-state campaign last time. There was no national Democratic effort or Democratic strategy, only "battleground state" plans and advertising. They put all their chips on Kerry and when he lost, they had lost the presidency as well as seats in both the house and Senate. (Of course, some of this is Wednesday morning quarterbacking- if Kerry had gotten 125,000 more votes in Ohio, Terry McAuliffe and the DNC would have been praised for "winning back the White House.") But they had no central theme to the campaign to build around and not enough effort was made to fight for winnable seats even in Republican states. Is Dean the right man to change this? I don't know, but I might give him a shot.