The Dean legacy

With a new party head soon to be nominated, Howard Dean's days at the head of the DNC are likely numbered. It's not a bad thing -- presidential candidates and Democratic presidents get to run the committee for obvious (and logical) reasons. And Dean will soon have a full four-year term under his belt. I'm sure he's desperate for a change of scenery. It's not the most relaxing job in the world.

But it does give us a reason to reflect on Dean's tenure in charge of the party. The first in what will likely be a parade of such pieces is a great piece by the Nation's Ari Berman.

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. That model would continue into '08. Dean could remain at the DNC as a figurehead but only if he stayed in line.

And then the effort to marginalize Dean collapsed. Partly it's because the party's Congressional takeover--and a subsequent study by Harvard's Elaine Kamarck documenting Dean's contributions toward that end--eventually silenced the Carville-ites. Partly it's because Barack Obama forced the Clintons to devote all their resources to fending off his insurgent candidacy. But another reason the DNC-in-exile never got off the ground was Dean himself. Dean is no longer a marginalized figure, the butt of "Dean scream" jokes, but a man with a powerful constituency in regions where his fifty-state strategy has energized aging, ailing or previously nonexistent state parties. His support to these parties has not only strengthened them but has created an independent power base for Dean himself.

It's amazing that when Jerome and I wrote Crashing the Gate, with its uncompromising promotion of the 50-state strategy, the notion was still considered incredibly controversial. Now, it's accepted CW in most quarters.

What's not amazing is that Jerome and I always knew that this was inevitable. We saw the party elite (dominated by the Clintonistas) in DC hoarding their power, sure, but we also saw that the masses outside the Beltway were far bigger, and collectively wielded far more power than the Ickes and the Podestas. Sure, they could raise a buttload of money and get their new organizations funded (and there's some good ones in that mix, like the Center for American Progress and MediaMatters), but their efforts to dominate and control the party machinery were doomed from the start. The people-powered movement would swamp them out.

So Dean became our surrogate and we propelled him to a dramatic victory as chair of the party. Sure, establishment Dems wailed and threatened and tried unsuccessfully to find an establishment-approved alternative to Dean. The equivalent today would be Mike Huckabee taking over the RNC after this election. Could you imagine the war inside the GOP if that were to become a possibility? That was us, in late 2004 and early 2005.

And sure, Republicans chortled:

Brian Nick, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, offered insight into how the GOP plans to make use of Dean.

"You have Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy and now Howard Dean coming to the forefront as spokespeople for their party," Nick said, referring to two of the most liberal Democratic senators. "You can’t get much more far left than that."

Carl Forti, Nick’s counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee, added: "I can think of nothing better for the long-term prosperity of the Republican Party than to have the Deaniacs come to Washington."

Those of us outside that DC cesspool knew better and we have been obviously proven right in the subsequent years. It's amazing how responsive the nation gets when you reorient your efforts beyond a few special states and decide that the whole country -- and the grassroots in each state -- actually matters.

But what's surprising to me is that in this day and age, the Clinton people are still so wedded to the early 90s that they continue to misread the political landscape -- a mistake the Obama camp has exploited to full advantage.

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 [...]

In contrast to Clinton's campaign, Obama's--with its hundreds of thousands of small donors, Internet buzz and red-state appeal--reflects to a great extent the realization of Dean's ideals. Dean's argument for how to rebuild and expand the party base for the long term found its perfect short-term exponent in Obama, whose appeal to independents and liberal Republicans and talk of "unity" is planting Democratic roots in unfamiliar places. "The Obama for President campaign is what all of us hoped Dean for President would become," says Steve McMahon, a former top Dean strategist who's stayed neutral in '08. "Obama is Dean 2.0, dramatically updated to reflect the emergence of the grassroots."

As I've noted before, Steve McMahon is the biggest asshole I've ever met on our side of the political aisle, but his quote here is pretty solid. And this more so:

Besides a desire to push the party away from a strictly swing-state mentality, Dean and Obama share a commitment to the nuts-and-bolts of grassroots organizing. On the stump Obama is quick to stress his roots as a community organizer and always thanks his precinct captains, who routinely introduce him at campaign events. "Change doesn't happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up," he now says in his stump speech. Obama's organizing has been greatly enhanced by new technologies like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace (Friendster had just arrived when Dean was running). "We pioneered it and Obama perfected it," Trippi says. Obama embraced elements of the new politics, hiring the co-founder of Facebook, for example; but other efforts came from the grassroots--just as with the Dean campaign--as supporters organized themselves online and on the ground. The net effect is Obama's large base of small donors, who are enthusiastic supporters he can tap again and again. Ninety percent of the $28 million he raised online in January, for example, came in donations of $100 or less. Obama has fused a tightknit group of advisers with a mass of ordinary people, creating what Trippi calls "command and control at the top while empowering the bottom to make a difference."

Of course there's been nothing like that from the Clinton side. Their "insult 40 states" strategy further communicated to the nation at large that unless you were a big Blue state, you didn't matter to Hillary. It was only recently that her campaign fully engaged her supporters online, and they have responded with a $35 million February fundraising drive, the bulk of it from small online donations. Ironic that such a number could be considered too little, too late, but it was.

But aside from the presidentials, we were all treated to the spectacle of Rahm Emanuel publicly railing against Dean for spending money in his 50-state strategy last cycle instead of concentrating resources on a few swing states (Schumer complained as well, but at least had the class to do so privately).

Yet let's see where our best pickup opportunities are this year. In the House and Senate, we are looking at competitive Democratic races in "Red" states Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming. Competitive races are likely to break out in at least some blood red states like Idaho, Kentucky, and Nebraska. And that doesn't include protecting our incumbents in tough places like Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana and Utah. And sure, while Missouri and New Mexico are traditional swing states that would get plenty of attention regardless, the rest have a tradition of being ignored by Democrats. Thanks to Dean and the 50-state strategy, that is no longer the case.

As the Republican Party becomes increasingly a regional party, locked out of entire swaths of the nation, the Democrats are headed in the opposite direction. We have a likely nominee that has a demonstrated commitment to furthering the pioneering work by Howard Dean in 2004 and beyond.

There was a battle over the soul of this party -- between those who would hoard power in DC, and those who would spread it around the entire country, empowering individuals to work toward a progressive national majority.

The good guys won, in no small part because of Dean.