DEAN VS. THE DEMOCRATS:

As Pre-Primary Season Closes, Questions Cling to Dean's Gains (Dan Balz, December 28, 2003, Washington Post)

[T]here is general agreement that the party establishment is not capable of mounting a stop-Dean movement. "What establishment?" one Democrat said sarcastically. "The only thing that could have an impact is if Bill Clinton came out and said, I don't appreciate a repudiation of my administration. The only people capable of doing it [a stop-Dean movement] are the unions, and they're pretty well split." [...]

"Democratic Party activists, whatever their ideological perspective, have a view that their leaders have been completely ineffective in combating President Bush," one Democratic strategist said. "The leaders have a view that either they're doing the best they can or that more clever centrism is better or they need someone with a military background at the head of the party."

Al From, who heads the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, credited Dean with running a successful campaign but questioned whether he can effectively lead the party as nominee. "We need to lay out a reason to replace Bush," From said. "We can't just depend on the fact that the activists in our party are angry at him and like Dean. There aren't enough of them."

But another centrist leader, Simon B. Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network, said party leaders here should recognize what Dean has done. "The Washington party is a failed party, and Dean's criticism of the Washington party is incredibly accurate," he said. "We're completely out of power and heading for permanent minority status if we don't start modernizing the party. Dean has been a modernizer and innovator, and should be embraced for it. Instead he's being attacked for doing it differently."

Those fault lines will animate the coming 60-day battle for the nomination. With the race as it now stands, the issue facing Democrats is whether anybody can stop Dean but Dean himself.

All those vulnerable congressional Democrats should have a fun time with their own nominee attacking them.

MORE:
-Dean denounces Democratic Leadership Council, stuns centrists (RONALD BROWNSTEIN, 12/25/03, Los Angeles Times)

During a campaign stop Tuesday in Seabrook, N.H., where he received an endorsement from the 1,000-member New Hampshire chapter of United Auto Workers, Dean said he stood by his remarks about the DLC. On Monday, he called the DLC, "sort of the Republican part of the Democratic Party ... the Republican wing of the Democratic Party." [...]

Tension between Dean and the DLC first seriously emerged early this year when Dean began identifying himself as the representative of "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

That was a designation liberals sometimes used during the Clinton years to distinguish themselves from centrist "New Democrats" who pushed ideas such as welfare reform, balancing the federal budget, and completing the North American Free Trade Agreement -- all ideas staunchly opposed on the left.

Dean's declaration Monday was more than rhetorical positioning; it also reflected his political strategy.

All year he has argued that Democrats' first priority should be to mobilize their core supporters, such as women's groups, blacks, union members and gay rights activists.

That directly inverts the argument from Clinton, first advanced by the DLC in a 1989 study titled The Politics of Evasion, that Democrats could only win the White House by reconnecting with moderate swing voters because their base no longer constituted a national majority on its own.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 28, 2003 6:01 AM