As many have noted, Barack Obama and his campaign have made good use of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, a strategy long ridiculed by the Clinton crowd.
Ari Berman in the March 17 issue of The Nation outlines Obama's embrace of the strategy as well as the Clinton camp's efforts to not only undermine and oust Dean, but also to return to the days of ignoring grassroots organizing in favor of Terry-McAuliffe-style, big donor courtship.
It is the difference between trying to build a lasting Democratic majority, or another one-off victory for a single candidate...
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The Clinton crowd is decidely "old school":
On November 7, 2006, all the top Democrats graced the stage of the Hyatt Regency ballroom in Washington for a big election-night victory party. All of them, that is, except Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
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A few months earlier, The New Republic had reported that Clinton's camp was "laying the groundwork to circumvent the DNC in the event that Clinton wins the nomination." This shadow DNC had a number of integral parts: adviser Harold Ickes would develop state-of-the-art technology to help Clinton reach prospective voters; EMILY's List and Clinton's allies in organized labor would launch an unprecedented effort to turn out supporters, especially women voters; former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe would raise untold sums from wealthy donors and the business community; and communications honcho Howard Wolfson would direct an unrelenting war room. Ever since 1992 the Clintons had used the DNC as an outpost for raising money from big donors, and funding candidates had taken precedence over nurturing progressive organizers.
As Berman notes, the effort to undermine Dean ultimately failed. State party leaders, who had been ignored by the Clinton/McAuliffe regime, gave Dean a base of support that could not be overcome by the Carville-led insiders, and a report by a Harvard professor proved the success of Dean's 50-state strategy.
Berman writes:
The race for the Democratic nomination is a window into how the candidates view the future of the party, which is being shaped in large part by Dean's efforts. Are Clinton and Obama similarly committed to Dean's fifty-state strategy? How much faith would each, as the Democratic nominee, put in the party's grassroots?
The answer is obvious, of course:
In the Internet era, the party is less about elder statesmen sitting in Washington than millions of people across the country organizing locally around issues and candidates. Dean and Obama have understood how the party is changing--and have embraced it. Clinton, thus far, has not.
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Yet in a larger sense, Hillary's candidacy represents the polar opposite of what Dean built as a candidate and party chair: her campaign is dominated by an inner circle of top strategists, with little room for grassroots input; it hasn't adapted well to new Internet tools like Facebook and MySpace; it tends to raise big contributions from a small group of high rollers rather than from large numbers of small donors; and it is less inclined to expand the base of the party.
That last phrase is the very reason I have never been a big fan of the Clintons and their surrogates. They have never been particularly interested in expanding the base of the party. This is as true with Hillary's campaign as it was with Bill during his tenure in the White House.
One need only witness the steady stream of dismissals of "red states" and caucuses, and complaints from the Clinton camp and Clinton backers about independents and even disaffected Republicans backing Obama, to underline this point.
As Berman writes:
Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is required reading in a class that Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, teaches at Northwestern University. If the Obama campaign naturally understood what Dean was trying to do, even though Dean's candidacy ultimately fizzled, the Clintons did not. "They looked at '04 and said, If Howard Dean lost, those tools must not have worked," Trippi says. He cites Clinton's unwillingness to compete all-out in red-state caucuses as a main reason her campaign is in such a predicament. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos dubbed Clinton's approach--and subsequent discounting of her losses in red America--the "insult 40 states" strategy. While the Obama campaign prepared for the long haul, Clinton poured most of her resources into a few key early states, expecting to have the nomination wrapped up by Super Tuesday. "It's not a very long run," Clinton predicted in late December. "It'll be over by February 5."
Not so, Hillary. While Clinton backers write frequently of Obama's "arrogance," is there a more arrogant comment than, "It'll be over by February 5," from Senator Inevitable?
Berman closes with this:
Dean had the vision, but others will get or share the credit. It took an Obama to realize the potential of the Internet and grassroots organizing to transform politics. And it will take the commitment of future DNC chairs to the fifty-state strategy to continue building the party from the ground up. "You know the expression, to be a prophet without honor in your own land," says Steve Grossman, Dean's former campaign chair. "That's Howard Dean."
I couldn't have said it better myself. Thanks, Howard. And thank you Barack Obama and David Axelrod for following through with efforts to build more than just an electoral victory for a single candidate, but, rather, a lasting Democratic majority all across America.