The dark side of the force has been calling to me recently, so I need to write something inspirational to get out of my rut. Last weeks issue of The Nation had a great cover story on Howard Dean,
Now He Has the Power, which actually remains to be seen. There is cause for hope.
I don't know how much leeway the still powerful dark forces of the DLC are going to grant Dean. I was never a Deaniac until Kerry lost the election. If ever there was a wake up call, the '04 election was it.
"If Kerry had won, he would have picked the chairman and it wouldn't have been Howard," says Mike Tate, a former DNC member who worked for Dean's presidential campaign. "What happened in November opened up a debate about the party's future that Dean could be a part of. In fact, he'll be leading it."
More in Extended Entry
The sentence that jumped out at me was the one I chose for the title of my diary:
They (the DLC and D.C. elites) never quite figured out that Dean was going to win because he'd been to that diner in Keokuk, and he'd met there with beleaguered grassroots Democrats who appreciated his saying,"We need to be proud to be Democrats"--and appreciated even more his suggestion that the way to express that pride is as a genuine opposition party.
Strong opposition to Dean remains. Jonathan Chait probably personifies the irrational opposition to Dean among the party elites:
But his enthusiasm is not echoed by the Democratic insiders in DC who have gotten so used to playing politics by GOP rules that they see Dean as a "madman" on a suicide mission that will wreck everything they know. New Republic commentator Jonathan Chait put their fears into words when he grumbled that "Dean, with his intense secularism, arrogant style, throngs of high-profile counterculture supporters and association with the peace movement, is the precise opposite of the image Democrats want to send out."
The Chait mentality is exactly the problem. Over at TNR they are so steeped in the GOPer mentality, it's a surprise they ever write anything coherent. Chait needs to turn off O'Really and start listening to the Dean that the grass/netroots hear.
Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson sums up the pro-Dean sentiment when he says Dean will "bring new spirit and new energy to the party, the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time.
The simple truth is that Dean was a very centrist Dem with a few progressive ideas and a strong Democratic vision for America.
There is no doubt in my mind that we will be hearing a drumbeat of support for Biden and Roemer in '08 from TNR starting any day now. Chait and the TNR O'Really fans need to get out of the beltway and visit some DFA Meet Ups or Democratic locals. They have about as much idea what's going on in the Democratic party as Fred Barnes does.
The big question is which Howard Dean will the new DNC Chair morph in to?
Dean has become the Democratic Party's Rorschach test. Frustrated grassroots activists and donors see him as the tribune of their antiwar, anticorporate and anti-Bush views. Big thinkers see him as an idea filter who understands the potential of neglected issues and strategies. State and local party officials recognize him as a former governor who understands that Democrats can compete in all fifty states and is more likely to listen to them than Congressional leaders who remain obsessed with "targeted" states and races.
I'm not sure Howard Dean really knows yet. There are so many factors that will determine what kind of Chair Dean is, not the least of which is the all important question of how much the DLC tries to rein Dean in.
Taking over as chairman of a party that is locked out of the White House and unable to muster anything more than a "minority leader" to flex its legislative muscle, Dean has positioned himself as the most camera-ready Democrat in the country. As such, he is in a position to make his party--as opposed to an individual candidate or faction--more newsworthy and potentially more dangerous than it has been in decades. What remains to be seen, however, is whether Dean's tenure will prove merely a wild ride or a ride into the flourishing future the new chair promises: with huge gains in the 2006 elections and a Demo- cratic President marching down Pennsylvania Avenue on January 20, 2009.
Reid and Pelosi have both made noises that Dean is not a policy maker. They seem to be suggesting that he should just raise money and keep his mouth shut like Terry McAuliffe tried to do. McAullife was a PR disaster. The more he made the news, the worse the Democratic party looked. Dean is not McAullife. Dean may be the best communcator the Democrats have since Bill.
Dean understands that the essence of a good political communicator is somebody who can execute strong message contrasts," says former DNC chair David Wilhelm, a Chicago-based pol who never quite fit into the Washington scene. "Maybe what seemed wild in a presidential candidate will seem much more normal in a chair of a national party." As such, Dean picked up lots of support from Democrats who were never Deaniacs but knew the party had to change.
That last sentence describes me to a "T". I became a Deaniac and started going to Meet Ups because Kerry's loss drove home how hopeless the Democratic party had become. The biggest threat to the Democratic party isn't Howard Dean. It's Joe Lieberman and Diane Feinstein and Joe Biden, who can all be counted on to provide Bush with bi-partisan cover on a variety of economic and foreign policy issues. The Democrats biggest problem is that they don't know how to beat a man when he's down. Like Carville said, "When your opponent is sinking, throw him an anvil."
The DLC seems more than ready to throw Bush a life preserver every time he gets into trouble. Was there a single Republican who every lifted a bi-partisan finger to help Clinton? The only bi-partisan voices I hear come from the Democratic side, and I don't see that they are getting anything in return for their efforts.
It will take consumate politcal skills to negotiate between the rocky whitewaters that divide the DLC power structure and the grass/netroots.
Now that Dean is chairman, he'll have to strike a balance between grassroots Democrats, who want the party to be more muscular in opposition, and Congressional Democrats, who tend to believe, as Pelosi has argued, that the chair will "take his lead from us." Dean, who once ran the Democratic Governors Association and knows a lot about party etiquette, won't go to war with the Congressional leaders. But, as one Dean backer said, "He has to prod them. I mean, what's the point of making Dean party chair if he isn't going to get these people to use their backbones?" Dean's aides say he will lie low initially, looking for fights where he can put a charged-up party to work for Congressional Democrats, perhaps in defense of Social Security, perhaps in opposition to a Supreme Court nominee.
I think John Nichols nails the rosetta stone for Dean's success:
But Dean's best chance to prove himself will be at the state and local levels, where three dozen governorships, attorneys general slots, control of state legislatures and thousands of county posts that are vital to rebuilding the party's infrastructure will be at stake. Dean's pledge to transform the party into a grassroots organization "that can win in all fifty states" will be put to the test. Dean--energized by the success that Democracy for America, the successor organization to his 2004 campaign, had in aiding successful local campaigns in places like Salt Lake County, Utah, and Montgomery, Alabama--relishes the prospect, an attitude that distinguishes him from predecessors who seldom found time for legislative races, let alone county commission contests.
Dean's plan to spend at least $11 million annually to beef up state parties will be his most expensive early initiative. But he has a lot of big ideas. "The tools that were pioneered in my [presidential] campaign--like blogs and Meetups and streaming video--are just a start," he says. "We must use all of the power and potential of technology as part of an aggressive outreach to meet and include voters, to work with the state parties, and to influence media coverage."
Another big factor will be how well Dean can do with the "vision thing".
But where Dean could cause the greatest stir is in championing bold new approaches that will again make the Democrats a party of ideas. He still converses with the wide circle of academics and activists who, during the 2004 campaign, transformed an initially cautious candidate into a champion of innovative proposals to create a national commission on how to restore democracy, break up media conglomerates and force corporations to provide not just a full financial accounting but also a social accounting of their adherence to environmental, labor and community standards. After the campaign finished, Dean kept talking to public intellectuals like Benjamin Barber, who introduced him to progressive leaders from around the world on a trip to Rome last year, and whose ideas about how America can relate to the world offer the party a framework for a positive internationalism.
The third really big question is whether Dean can get the Democratic party off the DLC fence. Will the Lieberman, Feinstein, Biden DLC centrists continue to give Bush bi-partisan cover? Will Bankruptcy "reform" and Medical Malpractice tort "reform" sail through Congress on a wave of DLC bi-partisanship? I think the biggest question yet to be anwered is whether the DLC centrists learned any lesson at all from the '04 election.
What's genuinely exciting about the Dean chairmanship is the prospect that the party might come to mirror its new chief's enthusiasm for bold stances and strategies. Dean's best applause line in the race for DNC chair was, "We cannot win by being Republican-lite. We've tried it; it does not work." For all the important talk of rebuilding state parties and using new technologies, what matters most about Dean's election as DNC chair is his recognition that Democrats have to be serious about holding out to Americans the twin promises of reform and progress, and that they are not going to do that by tinkering with the status quo. "We just can't let the Republicans define the debate anymore. We have to be the party of ideas," Randy Roy says from Topeka. "Dean understands that we have to be the party that shakes things up."
Hopefully, the go along to get along DLC centrists understand that letting Republicans define the debate is a losing proposition. I wish I was as hopeful about the DLC as I am about Howard Dean.
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