Alex Koppelman at Salon interviewed Howard Dean Wednesday. The former governor and Democratic National Committee chief cut against the conventional wisdom that Democrats are going to be devastated in November, perhaps even lose their House majority, as long-time analyst Charlie Cook has said.
"I think what you're going to see in the fall is not so much an anti-Democratic vote, I think you're going to see an anti-incumbent vote, and I think that's going to include Republicans," Dean said ...
"There are two good signs for the Democrats: One is all this blowup happened 10 months before the election, not 10 weeks before the election. Two, the average American believes that better times are ahead. Those are two important indicators. Now, there are plenty of indicators that aren't so good, but I think a month is a huge lifetime in politics, so I think we're actually going to do a bit better than people are predicting."
Republicans are working on their narrative. Tea partiers are working on theirs. How effective they will be depends in great part on how well Democrats, individually and collectively, can persuade Americans who like neither the Party of No Way, No How nor the Teabagger Brigades that they have a lot to lose by sitting on their hands in this year's contests. Given the frequent poor messaging, pre-compromising, surrendering and, frankly, kow-towing to certain interests by too many Democrats, making that case is going to be much tougher than it ought to be. The mistakes of the leadership rubs off on the rank-and-file.
Reinvigorating a big slice of now-demoralized voters who poured out in droves in 2008 - that is, bridging what Robert Reich calls "the enthusiasm gap" - will depend on having several more challengers like Bill Halter reminding everyone of what being a fighting Democrat is all about. For many vulnerable incumbent Democrats, persuading voters that they are fighters for middle/working-class Americans will be next to impossible to sell. Their record on this score, to put it charitably, registers an epic fail. But others can prove Dean right if they use the eight months they have left to demonstrate they're not just more of the same old, same old now armed with Twitter accounts. The place to do that is not so much on the campaign trail but in Congress itself.