Reply #5: More about trashing Dean than fighting Obama

[SanchoPanza]

Quite a few higher-ups in the DNC were plenty peeved when Dean won the DNC chair, and even moreso when he started pushing his 50-State Strategy which, ironically enough, was the same thing the GOP did following Watergate to rebuild their own abyssmal prospects. When it started actually working (and we saw the earliest returns on the investment in 2006), quite a few of them blew a gasket. Some people don't like it when their toes are stepped on in terms of where party funds are directed. Others aren't fond of radical departures from the current strategy, no matter how much of an utter failure it turned out to be. But a lot of them ended up seeing the light after 2006. Building the party from the ground up would push the GOP off balance and actually help in current swing states, and actually start to create new ones.

This isn't to categorically say that people who disliked Dean were Hillary supporters from the get go. Some were, and but the anti-Dean factions within the party have more or less hitched their bandwagon to the most convenient vehicle for blackening his name in anticipation for the next chairmanship election in 2009. If you think the party infighting is bad now, just wait.