Saying Something Nice About Howard Dean

Over at the Moderate Voice, Joe Gandleman seems a little vexed about the re-emergence of Howard Dean as the probable chair of the DNC: Democratic Party May Be Readying The Kool Aid

Commenting on an anti-Dean piece in the L.A. Times by Jonathan Chait, Gandleman states:

...watching the Democratic DNC chair be whittled down and Howard Dean roar into Big Mo territory raises these two questions, plus this one: does anyone in the Democratic party have a CLUE that part of the party's problem is an IMAGE problem as well as a vision and cohesive policy problems?

Although Dean can be a solid speaker, and the scream denunciations were overdone (which makes no difference since it was catastrophic to his candidacy), it's unlikely his image is going to bring back straying Democrats who seemingly deserted the Democratic party in 2004 the same way they left to become Reagan Democrats in the 80s.

I have to say, much to my chagrin, that I don't think this does much justice to Howard Dean. Oh, I thought he would have been just about the worst possible person to be in the Oval Office...hell, I think he shouldn't be allowed on the White House tour...but he did a number of things well in his campaign run.

Alone of the Democratic candidates, Dean had an effective grassroots organization. His campaign implemented new ideas effectively, raised lots of money, and easily retained a highly motivated and energetic core of supporters.

The failures of the Dean campaign were more failures of tactical decision making than anything necessarily inherent in Howard Dean.

1) They threw away their monetary advantage by diluting their media campaign across too many states and

2) Dean counted on the Democratic primary electorate being more uniformily against our being in Iraq then they proved to be. Kerry wound up being able to undercut potential Dean support by merely voicing vague sounding "concerns" about Iraq.

One artificial aspect of presidential primary campaigns is that you are not given time to learn from your mistakes. One misstep and you have to play catch-up. Two missteps and you are gone.

The DNC job isn't that type of affair. In fact it would seem to call for someone who did the positive things that Dean's campaign in fact did. Across the south the Democrats would be well served by building exactly the grassroots organizations that exemplified Dean's campaign at its best. Dean himself tried to voice something of this during the campaign, before he was cut down to size by the PC police.

Some might argue that Dean wasn't able to translate his grass roots core to the larger electorate, and while that is indeed true, I feel that was due more to the difficulty with his tactical decision to rely on the anti-war left during the primaries. He never tried to present a more moderate/centrist approach. That doesn't mean he as an ironclad rule wouldn't be able to.

As well, I don't put much stock into the primary postmortems that derided him as a lousy "manager" of his campaign. People whose profession it is to work in political campaigns always blame the candidate when things don't work out. "It wasn't my fault!" they all chime, "Please hire me for other campaigns!"

Look, Dean could be a disaster for the Dems. He might really be a nut. But, he might not. I'll wait and see before rendering a judgment.