Markos Moulitsas: From Dean scream to 50-state dream

babylonsister

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Tue Oct-28-08 04:54 PM
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Markos Moulitsas: From Dean scream to 50-state dream

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/28/11502/081/1009/643763

From scream to 50-state dream
by kos
Tue Oct 28, 2008 at 08:50:03 AM PDT

He who laughs last...

Dean stopped by a Democratic field office in Henderson last week, and to prep myself for the visit, I watched what�s known in political circles as

�The Scream.� It�s still funny.

But here�s the thing: Dean was right.

His hypothesis was simple: To be a national political party, you have to compete everywhere. It was called the �50 state strategy,� and it was unveiled in 2005.

Remember 2005?

That�s when Karl Rove was building a permanent Republican majority, and when President George W. Bush was going to save Social Security by privatizing it.

In 2005, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, campaigned among grass-roots activists to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Campaigned to be head of the DNC? That�s an establishment job, hand-picked.

Howard Dean? What a loser.

But politics is all about a little prescience and a little luck. Dean had both. He had the wisdom to know Democrats could win in a lot of places if they bothered to show up and make an argument. The lucky part: The public has turned on the Republican Party.

I keep saying it since I doubt people believe me -- when we were agitating for the 50-state strategy in 2003, 2004, and 2005, it was hugely controversial. Crashing the Gate may seem like a fairly conventional book today, but when Jerome and I wrote it in 2006, it was mocked as crazy talk. Funny how two years and a little success completely changed everything.

And here's one lagging piece of CW that still gets it wrong:

{Dean is} usually associated with the loony wing of the party, the MoveOn crowd and the liberal bloggers. But in reality, he had a vision for Democrats capturing the center, and it�s coming to pass.

Ah yes, us loony bloggers, fighting for universal health care, to protect social security, to keep our government from unconstitutionally spying on us, and to promote a sane foreign policy that doesn't unnecessarily cost us blood and treasure. You know, loony things supported by a majority of the (apparently also loony) American people.

Here's what too many people still don't understand -- there's nothing loony about the netroots. This isn't fertile territory for the McKinneys and Kuciniches of our party. This is fertile territory for the Howard Deans of our party -- sensible, pragmatic progressives who aren't afraid to be Democrats. Why? Because we're the nation. We're not clustered in DC and NYC, we're spread out over all 50 states, and we know better than anyone what it takes to win in our own backyards.

We didn't rally around Webb, Tester, Schweitzer, Trauner, Brown, Massa, Burner and so many other moderate Democrats because they were little Kucinich clones, but because they were perfectly suited for the states and districts they seek to represent. It's that simple. Howard Dean wasn't an anomaly. He was our ideal.

We are not the elites, we are America, and we're situated squarely in its ideological center. We proved it in 2006, and we'll prove it again next week.