Dean is Sole Candidate for Chairmanship of Democratic National Committee

Howard Dean, physician, former governor and screamer, is going to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, essentially the top man in the party. Many moderate Democrats (really just Rockefeller Republicans in the wrong party) have opined that this is an unmitigated disaster that will drag the party leftward and destroy any hopes of winning future elections. While wrong, they are entitled to believe this. If they were concerned about party’s future, though, they might do something about it, like back someone else. But the last alternative, Tim Roemer, has quit. “Chairman Dean,” get used to it.

In the American system, the title of “Party Chairman” isn’t quite what it is elsewhere. For example, Mao Zedong [Mao Tse-Tung for those who are a bit older] was de facto dictator of China because he was de jure chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Being chairman of the DNC is a far less powerful position. Only true political junkies can even name the outgoing chairman, and one is hard put to think of anything he has achieved apart from filling the party’s coffers.

And that, in all honesty, is what the DNC as a whole is all about. There are policy committees, and there are candidate workshops and all the rest, but money remains the mother’s milk of politics. Despite the best efforts of Feingold-McCain and other regulations to drive money from the American system, cash is at the heart of the political system just as surely as it lies at the heart of the economic system. One can decry this tendency toward plutocracy, and this journal certainly does, but dislike of a fact does not change its status as a fact.

In this role, Dr. Dean is immensely qualified. Before his organization in Iowa was found to be full of energy and bereft of focus, he was deemed the front-runner for the Democratic nomination based on the simple fact that he had raised more money that the other candidates. It was Dr. Dean’s volunteers who discovered fundraising by internet, a quantum leap from the “800” number campaigning invented by Governor Jerry Brown in 1991-92.

The hardcore activists and the celebrity dabblers in politics like the former governor of Vermont because he is seen as politically purer than most others in the business – he opposed the attack on Iraq from the beginning and never waffled about it. In other words, the only bridges he seems to have burned are with the party apparatchiks, who have nowhere else to go anyway.

© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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