The Strange Disappearance of Howard Dean

This is a great piece by Ari Berman of The Nation about Howard Dean. For all the thoughts in early 2005 that Dean would be an erratic chair of the DNC, he came in with a very tightly focused plan and he enacted it brilliantly. He wanted to strengthen state parties, implement the technology necessary to reach voters, and put organizers in the field throughout the country, surmising that most of life is showing up and that you have to offer Americans everywhere a choice. It succeeded pretty well.

It almost feels like ancient history, but "four years ago the Democratic Party was in a very different condition," Doctor Dean says at the beginning of his talk at the Y. Republicans had just retained the White House, gained four seats in the Senate and three in the House, and held twenty-eight governorships. Bill Frist was Senate majority leader, Dennis Hastert was House Speaker, George Bush's approval rating was at a healthy 50 percent and Karl Rove planned a "permanent Republican majority." It was "not a fun time to be a Democrat," Dean cracks.

How quickly things change. Four years later Democrats elected Obama with 67 million votes. They picked up seven seats in the Senate (with Minnesota still pending at press time)and twenty-one in the House, and they hold sixty of ninety-nine state legislative chambers. Obama's extraordinary campaign and Bush's remarkable mishandling of the country's domestic and foreign policies deserve much of the credit for the Democratic Party's resurgence, but so does Howard Dean. Before virtually any major politician, Dean not only sensed that the era of Republican ascendancy could be stopped but also how to do it, first through his trailblazing though unsuccessful presidential campaign of 2004, and then through his forceful stewardship of the party as DNC chair since 2005. "Dean gave the party a mission and a focus," says Paul Tewes, a top Obama strategist who ran day-to-day operations at the DNC during the general election. "That's a big deal when you're out of power." DNC member Donna Brazile calls Dean "one of the unsung heroes of this moment."

So unsung, in fact, that he has nothing to do now. Dean was never well-liked by the Beltway press (it's shocking how little he appeared on television despite being the DNC chair) or the Democratic establishment, and with people like Rahm Emanuel (who publicly sparred with Dean) back in power, Dean has basically been nudged out. The organizers in the states are on a leave of absence and nobody knows if that investment will continue. Obama basically emulated Dean's 50-state strategy and he might feel he can do it by himself now without any use of the former chair's strategies (I think the states like having the organizers, and the state party chairs will be very vocal in asking for it to continue).

It would be a mistake. Dean not only has a continued following among the grassroots, but he obviously has the skill to recognize how to pull off a national strategy to take back the country for Democrats and progressive values. That would come in handy as a governing strategy, don't you think?

Let's Be Optimists, Shall We?

If your only source of news is the cable shoutfest, you'd think that the Democratic Party was permanently fractured and unable to recover from this competitive primary between two evenly matched candidates. If you bother to read, you'd actually see that, at the same time as this primary, Democrats have increased their share of the electorate in party identification to their highest level since Bill Clinton's victory in 1992.

Pew says voters now favor the Democrats by a "decidedly larger margin" than the previous two election cycles.

Voters who identify themselves as Independents actually occupy first place at 37 percent, followed by Democrats at 36 percent and Republicans at 27 percent. That's a 3 point gain for Democrats since 2004 and a 6 point drop for Republicans, putting them at their lowest ebb in 16 years.

The Democrats have added to that an edge among self-described independents. In 2004, independents broke roughly evenly among the two parties with 12 percent favoring Democrats and 11 percent the Republicans. But now, 15 percent lean Democratic compared to 10 percent who lean Republican. That means Democrats have a 51 percent to 37 percent margin if the leaners are combined with those who outright identify themselves as being for one party or the other.

It's just going to be hard for Republicans to overcome this in a general election, especially considering that the head-to-head matchups between a presumptive McCain and a feuding Obama or Clinton are at their lowest ebb right now. The fact that Pennsylvania Democrats were so energized by a rare contested primary that they increased their registration by 160,000 voters and now have a 800,000-vote lead in registration statewide is almost insurmountable, and that's a swing state in November. And 120,000 of these new registrants aren't converts; they've never voted before. People are fed up with conservative Bush-era policies and are coming out of the woodwork to make a difference. And the Republican state parties will be of no help in trying to hold back this progressive wave.

At a time when the GOP presidential nominee will need more assistance than ever, a number of state Republican parties are struggling through troubled times, suffering from internal strife, poor fundraising, onerous debt, scandal or voting trends that are conspiring to relegate the local branches of the party to near-irrelevance.

In some of the largest, smallest, reddest and bluest states in the nation, many state Republican organizations are still reeling in the aftermath of the devastating 2006 election cycle, raising questions about how much grassroots help the state parties will be able to deliver to presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

The state party woes are especially ill-timed since McCain will face a Democratic nominee who may be considerably better funded and organized, and since Republicans will be facing an energized Democratic party that is shattering primary election turnout records.

I already knew this was a big problem here in California, where the state party is mired in debt. I didn't know it was the case nationwide.

Let's finish up this primary and have organizing opportunities in Pennsylvania, along with winnable states like North Carolina and Kentucky and Oregon. And then, let's have the animosity melt away as we focus on the real issue in November - continuing the failed policies of the conservative Bush era, or moving in a different direction.