What We Can Learn From Howard Dean

The Next Right ^ | December 19, 2008 | Cahnman

[St. Louis Conservative]

The Nation has a profile on Howard Dean that's well worth reading.

Money Graf:

A few months later the state chairs asked Dean and the other contenders for DNC chair to give $200,000 a year to each state party. Dean enthusiastically embraced and enlarged the plan en route to easily winning the DNC race and gave every state the resources to hire at least three or four organizers and access to a high-tech database of voters, which became the twin cornerstones of the fifty-state strategy. Under Dean, battlegrounds like Ohio still took priority, but every state got something. That might not sound like much, but it was practically a revolution within the Democratic Party, which tended to view the DNC as a PR agency and ATM for Congress and/or the White House. "We had a great building and no debt," Dean says, referring to the work of his predecessor, the high-flying Clintonite Terry McAuliffe. "But there was essentially no technological infrastructure and no political infrastructure of any worth." The states, by and large, had been left to fend for themselves.

As someone who was skeptical about Dean, I'm surprised how successful he's been. That said, there are certain lessons I think we need to learn from this moving forward:

1) COMPETE EVERYWHERE - This is the most important lesson we need to internalize. That's why I wrote my controversial blog post about San Francisco. Woody Allen says 80% of success is showing up and he's largely right....con't

[reagan_fanatic]

[Admin Moderator]

In the future, note the Activism sidebar is reserved for News/Activism of the FR chapters - not this.

[BlueStateBlues]

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