“If you think you have seen this movie before — ‘Dean Against the Machine’, you have…Then, as now, Dean inspired an outside-the-Beltway, Net-based crusade whose shock troops adored his social progressivism and his fearless opposition to war in Iraq. Then, as now, a party establishment — based in Congress, governors’ mansions and Georgetown salons — viewed him as a loudmouthed lefty whose visibility would ruin the Democratic brand in Red States.” Writing in breathless hyperbole mode as usual, Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman surveys the consensus anti-Dean reaction among DNC poobahs (purportedly being led by the 2008-conscious Clintons.)
I remained pretty agnostic about Dean’s candidacy last winter – when he seemed he had the big mo, I was all for the party getting behind him. But, I can’t say I was heartbroken by any means after the Iowa collapse. (In retrospect, of course, it’s hard to think of a single state that Kerry won that Dean also wouldn’t have carried.) That being said, to my mind Dean as DNC chair makes for a much better fit. The job of DNC chair is to fire up the grass roots and get Dems elected, and Dean has already shown a marked ability to achieve the former. Plus, it was the protective-camouflage, middle-of-the-road DNC’ers that foisted Terry McAuliffe on us, and he was an out-and-out embarrassment from start to finish. (Don’t agree? Go look at the November results again.)
As many others have noted, Dean isn’t nearly as lefty as he’s being made out to be — He’s a fiscally conservative governor. As such, the reaction he has fostered among the insider crowd has very little to do with governing ideology and a lot to do with one faction desperate to maintain controlling power over the party. Dean or no, if the DNC chairmanship is filled by another unenterprising flunky along the lines of McAuliffe, we’ve already started down the road to more of the same in 2008, right down to the losing.