Politics

Howard Dean's Reign of Error

By Matt Cooper

I always liked Howard Dean and thought he got an unfair rap in the 2004 election. That scream? Big deal. And stuff he took crap for at the time, like saying that the capture of Saddam Hussein, would not make our troops safer turned out to be painfully prescient. Dean was more sensible and wise than the media ever allowed. But I'm now also deeply grateful he never became president of the United States.

As chairman of the Democratic National Committee he's been a mess. Just yesterday it emerged that the DNC raised less than its Republican counterpart. How can that be when the Democratic candidates are lapping their Republican competitors in terms of fundraising? If Dean couldn't harness that small-donor enthusiasm for the DNC during these times, imagine what it will be like when Democrats are less galvanized. More importantly, Dean allowed the Florida and Michigan situation to spin out of control. It's not all his doing, by any means. The party agonized about how to open up the Hew Hampshire and Iowa leadership role in the presidential primaries and came up with the awkward Nevada Caucuses which I wrote about at length for the print edition of Conde Nast Portfolio last year. Michigan jumped the line at the behest of the state's leading Democrats because it felt left out of the process. Florida moved up, too. Dean's sanction was to deny seats to all the delegates elected in those states. This was a huge mistake. The Republicans, by contrast, stripped their line-cutters of half their delegates which seems like a much more appropriate sanction. If my kid cuts on line at a cafeteria, I won't buy him dessert but I will let him eat lunch.

The consequences of such a draconian sanction are now obvious. No one in their right mind thinks that the Democrats can simply not have two of the nation's largest--and electorally pivotal--states go unrepresented in the selection of the next president. If Democrats believe in one thing it's that there should be no more Florida 2000s, no more disfranchisement, no more court battles and messes. But Dean's ubersanction has led us into an insane replay of Florida as farce. Dean supporters wills ay that his 50-state strategy of putting DNC resources into the reddest of states helped Democrats recapture Congress. But surely that victory had much more to do with the war and the mood of the country and the strong candidates recruited by the Schumer-Emmanuel-run campaign committees in Congress and not the DNC. Now the party has less money than the GOP and an insane rules fight not seen since the days of the McGovern commission. That's not exactly change we can believe in.

Full post as published by Portfolio.com: Capital on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).