Article on the DNC Chair Race

It’s being reported that Dean has the public endorsements he needs tow in the race and Simon Rosenberg officially withdrew. Ryan Lizza at the New Republic writes a great article that summarizes the race. (have to be a subscriber)

The strange thing is that the three candidates I was okay with were the three finalists. I’m not convinced Dean is the best solution simply because of the baggage he carries as Howard Dean. My biggest concern was that the State Chairs would extract too much and not seek to reform their own parties which is desperately needed because the desperate need is to build a farm team up from the bottom that is strong and less centered on incumbency in DC–a necessarily safe seat leaning view.

Dean may now be in the position of Gingrich who fought Bob Michel’s tendency towards compromise and getting what you can out of DC into full partisan warfare that brought the Republicans the Majority in both Houses.

Dean is in a position to build a true opposition party that isn’t worried about nibbling at the edges of legilslation, but providing a clear coherent attack on the ruling party’s agenda and thus an agenda to win, not just avoid losing more.

Gingrich was often seen as too ideological and too far right by many of the establishment Republicans during the late 1980s and early 1990s. But he won and he won not by compromise or moving to the middle, but by selling the ideas he liked that worked in the middle. By crafting a clear and coherent message on which to build his movement, he was able to define it in the middle even if overall he wasn’t. He took those ideas that were to the center of the public—term limits and balanced budgets and sold those while playing to his base on other issues. Gingrich then went too far and was stopped, but even then, his party still controls Congress. The parallels to the corruption in the Democratic Party in the 1990s with the lingering effects of Jim Wright and Rosty are very close to the problems we see developing around DeLay.

Dean, by laying claim to reform, can do the same now, though he needs to be able to convince the Washington players to go along.