HOWARD DEAN: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S UNLIKELY RISING STAR

The first time I met Howard Dean, he was far from a household name. In fact, although he was a declared candidate for president, he wasn't registering on the national polls... yet. He called up and asked if he could come over and meet. I wasn't busy and from the little I had read about him I already had a good feeling, a favorable impression. He arrived around 7 or 8 AM for breakfast. I've met every Democratic president since a horse in JFK's "motorcade" stepped on my foot in front of Dubrow's Cafeteria on Kings Highway when I was a child. (JFK came inside to see if I was OK. I was.) Not one of them impressed me as much as Dean. He was the realest-- by far more a regular guy than a politician. And his vision for America... my eyes still well up when I think about what he told me about the reasons he got involved with politics and how he hopes to help America. I have never lost faith that Howard Dean would be the best president since FDR.

A couple days ago ROLL CALL ran a 10-months-in evaluation of Dean's performance thus far as Chairman of the Democratic Party. Keep in mind that Democratic grassroots activists, not Inside the Beltway careerists and hacks put Dean in his job. The Inside the Beltway types opposed him. But, according to the ROLL CALL piece, the party's elected officials are breathing a sigh of relief and have drastically re-evaluated their positions. Example: House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (who supported the far more corporately-oriented and somewhat less progressive former Texas congressman Martin Frost) says he is pleasantly surprised and impressed by what he's hearing about Dean from Democrats all over the country.

The old opponents say he's gotten smarter, moved away from the left, and toned down the incendiary rhetoric but that's utter bullshit; he was always smarter-- and will always be smarter-- than they are. His record as a governor clearly shows a moderate mainstream American, not a doctrinaire leftist. What's really happening to cause all the good feelings is that Dean is doing exactly what he said he would do when he ran for DNC chairman; he's putting most of his time and efforts into energizing and building the base-- EVERYWHERE.

Dean, according to ROLL CALL "is spending money for long-term payoff by setting up for the first time a Democratic organizing infrastructure all across the country, including in previously neglected states where the party has struggled... So far the DNC has hired paid organizers in 38 states, sapping much of the $39.2 million collected this year. 'We are going to have the resources we need to support Democratic candidates all across the country in 2006,' said DNC spokesman Josh Earnest. 'The way Gov. Dean is going to build the party for the long term is at the grass-roots level and we want to do that in every community in America,' he added. 'We want to be a true national party and the way to do that is by investing in communities all across the country and at the grass-roots level.'"

What's great is that many of the Inside the Beltway Democrats don't even see how the subtle hand of the good doctor is working to gently drive the direction of the Democratic Party in a way more amenable to the grass roots. With no Democrat in the White House to set a unifying party agenda, it was up to Dean to ease the party into focussing on GOP corruption, to craft an effective message about how Republican neglect had as much to do with the catastrophe of Katrina as Mother Nature did (and to put the spotlight on all the poverty that the nation saw on TV) and to help Democratic elected officials understand the venal and destructive nature of Bush's occupation of Iraq and feel safe in criticizing it and offering an alternative.


KRUGMAN UPDATE!

Krugman's NY TIMES columns are so consistently awesome that I almost never re-publish them because it would hint that one is better than another but they're all so great that that would be misleading and, after all, I'm not in the Bush Regime so misleading is not something I'm allowed to do. Today's Krugman column, however, is a particularly enchanting until-now-undiscovered continuation of the classic Hans Christian Andersen parable "The Emperor's New Clothes." I'm sure I don't have to tell you which imbecile plays the role of The Emperor (hint: he's in Argentina today looking even more monkey-like than usual and bringing our nation into further disrepute). However, the reason I'm updating a story about Howard Dean with with a Krugman piece about a chimpanzee in Argentina has, in fact, nothing whatsoever to do with chimpanzees or Argentina. It does, though, point out how fascists and their media allies at Fox and Fox-imitators called CNN trivialize and silence an effective and charismatic opposition figure. I bet you'll be able to figure it out with no further explanation.