WP: SETTING THE BEAT
The Dems, Now Dancing to His Tune
By Perry Bacon Jr.
Sunday, April 6, 2008; Page B04
....Democrats have some good reasons to stop kicking Dean around. You don't hear the word "prescient" used very often to describe the much-maligned chairman, but one can make a pretty plausible case that his six years on the national Democratic scene have had a significant impact on his party -- on machinery, message and methods. If the Democrats win in 2008, they may come to thank Dr. Dean for providing the medicine that cured some of the party's ills.
Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has been groundbreaking on many levels, but its widely hailed use of the Internet to create a large base of small donors largely recycles the breakthrough that powered Dean's 2004 campaign. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, hired and ran the online fundraising team, but Dean himself had the foresight to embrace the Web revolution. Some 2008 candidates seem not to have followed suit: Despite having had more time to plan for her presidential run, Clinton has often found herself outmaneuvered at creative online fundraising by Obama, and unless Sen. John McCain builds a truly imposing Web-based money machine, he may find himself at a sizable fundraising disadvantage to either Democrat.
But it's not just Dean's tactics that have been widely influential in the Democratic Party; it's his words, too. Take education. In 2002, congressional Democrats overwhelmingly backed President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which mandated annual testing in earlier grades. The legislation's merits are still hotly debated, but its politics are not....Dean's other key issue, of course, was Iraq....
Dean was making an even larger point when he declared in 2003-04 that he represented "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." Whatever success President Bill Clinton's brand of triangulation had met with in the 1990s, Dean argued, the time for split-the-difference politics was over. George W. Bush's Washington was being run by a highly partisan group of Republicans, Dean said, and he wanted the Democrats to "function as an opposition party." He struck a populist note, appealing directly to the party's base, and openly mocked Clinton-era centrists such as the Democratic Leadership Council (which replied that his candidacy was for Democrats who wanted to vent, not govern)....
***
As the Democrats tried to win back Congress in 2006, Dean found himself back at the center of controversy. The new DNC chairman set out to forge what he called the "50-state strategy," spending millions to start building party organizations in red states such as Alabama. That infuriated congressional Democrats who wanted to spend the money on targeted districts in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania....Dean's basic point was also something Democrats may come to embrace: Far more Democrats live in some very red states than you might guess, and if the Democrats want to build a permanent majority in Congress, they'll need to win at least some seats in those areas. (Consider an Obama rally in Boise last month that drew 14,000 people.) This year's long Democratic primary process may well be doing what Dean's DNC could not have afforded on its own: building Democratic organizations in states such as Idaho....
(Perry Bacon Jr. is a political reporter for The Washington Post.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/04/AR2008040403227.html?nav=most_emailed 
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