It's utterly ridiculous to believe that Dean is "in the tank" for Obama

[cali]

and has always been opposed to Hillary. Why would he have let the primary schedule favor her so heavily if that were true? And it did. It was heavily front loaded and that should have favored Hillary. It's only because she faced Obama and ran such a poor campaign that she wasn't the presumptive nominee after Feb 5.

It's true that the Clinton faction of the party tried desperately to keep Dean from becoming chair, and tried, in anticipation of hill's run for the presidency, to install faithful Harold Ickes as chair. It's true that the Clinton faction of the party tried to sabotage Dean. But I have never seen anything that indicates that Dean has favored Obama. Not one shred of credible evidence has been presented by Hill fans.

Here's what Howard Dean really, really wants: He wants dems to win. And as his term as chair draws to a close, he really wants dems to win the WH. That's his raison d'etre. his legacy is tied up in the success dems have in November.

Suggesting that Dean hates the Clintons and has been out to screw poor victimized hill, is just more sour grapes from those whining about how everything has been stacked against poor pitiful Hill.

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Can Anyone Point To A Single Anti-Clinton Ruling?

Rulings on Florida and Michigan were made long before they pretend-voted, so they were not known to affect Clinton more at the time they were made (and she agreed to them).

[cali]

2. no, of course they can't. Because Dean hasn't done one thing

that would indicate that he favors Obama over Hillary. They just lie.

[rucky]

3. Obviously anybody who disagrees with the Clintons on MI & FL

are in bed with Obama, who engineered a lead among delegates and superdelegates through an intricate system of primaries and caucuses - just to undermine Hillary as the nominee. And who set up this intricate system or primaries and caucuses? The DNC!

So there you have it.

[DemVet]

4. Good, then maybe he'll support the more electable candidate, Clinton, for President.

[cali]

7. No. That would be just as wrong as his favoring Obama.

His job requires that he remain neutral until we have a presumptive candidate. I'm sure you would have just loooved it if a Ickes or another completely partisan Clinton hack had gotten the chairmanship. Luckily for dems, that didn't happen.

And I don't think Hilly is anymore electable than Obama. At least we know that Obama knows how to run a campaign and win against the odds. We know that hilly can have everything favoring her and still blow it.

[SanchoPanza]

5. More about trashing Dean than fighting Obama

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.

[Window]

6. If anyway, it's probably the other way around -- the Clintons dislike Dr. Dean.