Go, Howard, go!

February 21st, 2005 – 8:54 pm
Tagged as: Uncategorized

As you may (or may not) have heard, Howard Dean, my favorite candidate among the 2004 Democratic hopefuls, is the new Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As this article points out, his election to the post is something of a revolution:

Over the last 150 years, by tradition, the Democratic chairman had been an insider with powerful pals – a crony of the president, or protege of a key senator, or a front man for fat-cat donors. And the choice of that leader, by the voting members of the Democratic National Committee, had generally been “a rigged deal,” as party strategist James Carville puts it.

Dean breaks the mold. Never before has the leader of a grassroots citizen army captured this job. The same guy who once inveighed against “the Washington politics-as-usual club,” and who once referred to members of Congress as “cockroaches,” has been given a mandate to shake things up – courtesy of the party’s 447 voting members, who hail from all 50 states and who no longer intend to follow the old guard.

“This is a revolutionary redefinition of the party chairmanship,” said Brian Lunde, a former national party official who, during the 1980s, helped several Democrats win the chairmanship. “We are moving into totally uncharted waters.”

Let’s hope that this is the start of moving the Democratic party away from sucking up to corporate donors, and back toward working to energize the base of the party. The “moderate” DLC has had it’s day, and it managed to almost destroy the Democrats entirely by letting the Republicans pull the so-called center of the debate further and further toward the right. It’s time for a new era to begin, and hopefully Howard’s the man to do it.

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