The Right Man To Head The Party Redux

“This is not a roomful of Democratic party regulars,” Dean opened, and the crowd roared its agreement. So he introduced them to Will Rogers’ standard party punchline, ‘I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.’ But Dean didn’t play it for laughs. ‘Everybody always laughs at that, but we’ll laugh ourselves right out of existence,’ he warned, if Democrats and progressives don’t do the serious work of organizing a base.

“It’s not enough to vote, I want you to run for office,” he told the crowd. ‘If you can’t run for office, if you’re a single mother, give three hours a week to someone else’s campaign. Cough up five, 10, 25 dollars.’ He stopped short of former campaign manager Joe Trippi’s call for John Kerry to abandon the public financing system and rely on a small-donor Internet base, but he did say “the best campaign finance reform is raising money from small donors. That’s how we take this country back.”

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In his second speech, Dean whipped the crowd into a cheering frenzy by noting that “Bill Clinton was the only guy to balance the budget. If it takes a liberal to balance the budget, well then we need a liberal in the White House, because you can’t trust this government with your money.” And it was hard not to marvel at this lefty crowd cheering over a balanced budget.

But Dean also respected the group’s desire to build its own infrastructure, not merely become foot soldiers for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. He lauded both men, and asked the crowd to “put your heart and soul into electing them,” but he also insisted they do more than work for the top of the ticket. “We have to undo 20 years of neglecting the Democratic party infrastructure,” he said.

I truly believe that if Howard Dean can be persuaded to take over the chairmanship of the Democratic Party he could change everything. He is really a wholesale politician and as such can actually make the party be more responsive to the grassroots, but even more importantly in my book, he can begin the necessary liberal education project that can change the way this country thinks about politics.

If politicians can win as liberals they will run as liberals. We have some serious work to do to make that possible and it’s going to take more than just saying words that we liberals all like to hear. If Dean can persuade people to run for office at the local level and the state level and begin to change the cultural identification so many Americans feel toward conservative “values based” politics then he will have more long term influence than he would have had as president.