Howard Dean's appearance yesterday on THIS WEEK affirms again my belief that he's the best candidate for DNC Chair. Among his comments:
That's why I'm running for DNC chair. Democrats hope that once in a while a John F. Kennedy or a Bill Clinton will come along and all of a sudden, aha. We can't do that. What the Republicans have is a better system than ours. Now, we made great strides in this election but the Republicans have 14,000 people on the ground in Ohio. We have to bring them in. Now, the next time, through training and through money to the state parties and building up state parties through grassroots organizations, I want to have a system that's as good as the Republicans and the time after that I want to have a system that's better than the Republicans because the one thing that Republicans don't do is they don't empower their people on the ground. They, they give the orders from on high and then the masses go forth and do their bidding. I think if you empower people on the ground to make their own decisions, the Democrats can win again. I'm interested in this because of the systems, not because of the policy.
I agree with the diagnosis and I agree with the proposed solution. If nothing else in the last campaign, he demonstrated he could organize and motivate. Let's let him do it again.
I think this is good...I think. I liked Dean during the run-up to the primaries, almost. My Democrat Soul was ready to leap up and campaign for him. My Democrat Mind kept saying "he'll get us killed, he'll get us killed". As it turned out, I never had the chance to vote for him anyway, but I would rather have gone down with him than with Kerry.