Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean: Monday's decision by Scott Maddox and the Florida Democratic delegation to the DNC to endorse Howard Dean will precipitate the quickening of opposition to Dean's candidacy (as well as give Dean the potential to break this thing wide open).
If the governors or Southern party chairs from other states want to stop him, they'll probably need to stop him by the end of next week.
It is hard to see how a Bob Kerrey or even a John Edwards entry in the race could reduce the number of votes that Dean ultimately gets. Look at his Hotline survey number, add in the Florida delegation (minus a few who are double counted) and he is fast approaching 100 votes, a number that some of his opponents think he has already surpassed.
He is now emphatically the frontrunner, though he has not yet accumulated more votes than the combination of his opposition, and 50 percent is the threshold.
"'The only knock against Howard Dean is that he's seen as too liberal,'" Mr. Maddox said. 'I'm a gun-owning pickup-truck driver and I have a bulldog named Lockjaw. I am a Southern chairman of a Southern state, and I am perfectly comfortable with Howard Dean as D.N.C. chair.' LINK
The three questions are:
1. Does Dean have a ceiling below 50 percent? 2. Is there someone in the race now who can coalesce the anti-Dean forces? 3. Is anyone else big getting in?
If the answers to those questions are "no," we all need to start thinking about the meaning of the phrase "Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean," but we aren't sure there are three "no's" there.
On the other hand, heck, if Jim Jordan is comfortable with his ex-arch nemesis, who are we to argue?
Jordan is doing work for Dean's bid for chair (as was eye-poppingly reported in Saturday's New York Times with atypically Nagourneyian understatement).
Perhaps Dean is still "an unemployed doctor with no responsibilities"* and still occasionally "slip[s] into incoherence"* but Jordan sees him today as the best candidate for what the Democrats need right now, and both men are smart enough to put aside their differences.
(* = recycled campaign quote).
"For most of 2003," Jordan - then John Kerry's campaign manager - tells us now, "I had a front row seat for the Dean Phenomenon, an up close view of just how powerful and transformative a leader he is. He has, I think, a real vision for the future of the party and solid ideas for how to take it there. So that's why I'm lending a hand. That, and because he asked."
The Boston Globe's Peter Cannelos, sensing the possibly inevitable, puts things in perspective:
"The anti-Washington tone of Dean's attacks is reminiscent of GOP attacks on Democrats in the '90s, when Republicans cemented their 'outsider' credentials. Traditionally, the DNC chairman, currently former Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe, is the consummate insider, and Dean could provide an important bridge to the party's grass roots. He was also an early advocate of injecting more talk of values into the Democratic side of the debate. Long before Senator Edward M. Kennedy was calling for a values-based dialogue with Republicans, Dean was consulting with University of California at Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, whose theories help explain why Republicans succeed at framing issues more clearly than Democrats." LINK
"At the same time, Dean's tactics - Internet organizing and fund-raising, staged protests, sloganeering - come uncomfortably close to those of the political fringe, and Democrats must recognize that Dean's connection to anti-Bush groups like Moveon.org is a mixed blessing. Other political stars who had moments of fame in presidential politics, including Republican Harold Stassen and Democrat Eugene McCarthy, became perennial fringe candidates, seeking to relive their moments of glory like aged Norma Desmonds. It's possible to envision that happening to Dean."
But we'd say that Dean is not a candidate for political office. He's a candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee. He is winning support because he excites DNC members and restores their faith in their party. As a thought experiment, imagine what people would say about Terry McAuliffe or Ed Gillespie were they to run for elected office.
Using the same thought experiment, you can also see the downsides to a Dean candidacy: McAullife was partisan but not polarizing; he didn't bring to the DNC a political ideology that everyone who runs against a Democratic opponent in a purple state can point to (full-throated liberal instincts tempered, somehow, with fervor for balanced budgets. Oh yeah, and let the small states decide what to do about guns themselves.) And Dean's rhetoric suggests now that Democrats have a natural majority out there they're not tapping into because folks sense Democrats don't believe in their causes or because Republicans have duped socially conservative economic populists.
David Brooks, of course, believes the opposite, and if he's right - if there are today more conservatives out there than liberals and more moderates willing to vote for conservatives - than Democrats would do well not to allow Dean to become one of the chief public spokespeople for their party's values.
But even Dean supporters don't have to worry about that so much because the Democratic governors have already suggested they will claim the mantle of policy innovation, red-state organization nurturing and become the public elected-official faces of the party.
A lot to chew on . . .
Now dessert: The Washington Post's Mark Leibovich offers a succinct, wise, and wildly observant look at Dean, "the former rock star in a field of 'American Idol' contestants" in the race for DNC chair, who insists that politics is politics and he's running on the same message of reform that he always was. LINK