Not that I hadn't considered this before, but I'm glad
ABC News writes about a possible Howard Dean/Simon Rosenberg team to head the DNC.
Several top party strategists are in the mix. Rosenberg, the president of the New Democrat Network, has the support of many of younger party fund-raisers and is seen by some as a hands-on manager who could correct the party's problems over the long term. Some Democrats partial to Rosenberg believe he'd make a great behind-the-scenes facilitator for a party chair like Dean.
Among the other tidbits in this story:
- Brazille and Ickes do not want the job. Neither do former NH Guv Shaheen or current VA guv Warner (who hopefully makes a Senate bid in 2006).
- Vilsack (IA guv) and Barnes (former GA guv) DO want the job. Both are being encouraged by the "moderate" wing of the party.
- The AFL/CIO's John Sweeney, not a Dean ally, seems comfortable with a Dean chairmanship.
As to the challenges facing the new DNC chair, this piece notes the following:
- reforming dilapidated state parties in many of the battleground states, which are incapable of years-long voter registration efforts and which pale against much stronger GOP organizations in those same states;
- curing disaffection by fund-raisers who are inclined to spend to keep the Democrats competitive but want bang for their buck and need benchmarks, like election victories, to keep them engaged;
- bringing together a fractured base, combined with worries that a once solid hold on Hispanics has slipped;
- dealing with the 2008 primary calendar and serving as an honest broker between Iowa and New Hampshire, which would like to keep their first-in-the-nation status, and states like Michigan, which want to sunder the old calendar in favor of more influential regional primaries;
- dealing with labor unions, which face internal struggles to reform how they operate and hemorrhage hundreds of thousands of workers to nonunion contracts every year.
Here's my take: we need someone who isn't part of the status quo. If we get another party insider, we'll get more of the same: losing.
Take out Clinton from the equation, and we haven't had any real electoral success at the federal level in over a generation. Is Dean the answer? Who knows, but what do we have to lose? It's not as if the current crew have any clue about winning.
And this crap about being a "moderate" party is just that -- crap. We got the independent voters this time. Didn't mean shit. We still lost. The Republicans learned this years ago. It's about time we learn the lesson. This doesn't mean becoming the party of Dennis Kucinich. It means becoming the party of Democrats, unafraid to stand for something other than Republican-lite.