has the Bai article about the Mouth up.
It appears his vaunted "50-state strategy" is sucking precious amounts of money away from electing Democrats with a chance to win:
This conflict between the party’s chairman and its elected leaders (who tried mightily to keep local activists from giving him the job in the first place) might be viewed as a petty disagreement. But in fact, it represents the deepening of a rift that has its roots in the 2004 presidential campaign — a rift that raises the fundamental issue of what role, if any, a political party should play in 21st-century American life. Dean ran for president, and then for chairman, as an outsider who would seize power from the party’s interest-group-based establishment and return it to the grass roots. And while he has gamely tried to play down his differences with elected Democrats since becoming chairman, it seems increasingly obvious that Dean is pursuing his own agenda for the party — an agenda that picks up, in many ways, where his renegade presidential campaign left off. Now, at power lunches and private meetings, perplexed Washington Democrats, the kind of people who have lorded over the party apparatus for decades, find themselves pondering the same bewildering questions. What on earth can Howard Dean be thinking? Does he really care about winning in November, or is he after something else?
The mere fact that Democrats would consider a “50-state strategy” to be novel — as if a national party might reasonably aspire to something less — says volumes about the rapid deterioration of the party that was, for most of the last century, America’s dominant political force. Back when Democrats were the established majority, the state parties were run by bosses who doled out jobs and delivered votes, while the national party, functioning as a subsidiary of whoever happened to occupy the Oval Office, worried about electing presidents. For decades, the party claimed a sizable majority of the nation’s governors, senators and congressmen, and in every one of the states where it controlled those seats, there was a centralized organization — a party “infrastructure,” in the parlance of today’s activists — whose job it was to recruit candidates and make sure voters got to the polls.
The strategy sounded good until our dictatorship started going into freefall thanks to Iraq and Katrina, and as a result, for the first time in years, the Democrats now have a chance of taking at least one house of Congress. Realizing this party bigwigs then began to think the Mouth once again screwed up, just as his campaign was mismanaged. However, he didn't need Joe Trippi to screw things up.
In the end, the GOP is going into the fall elections with a huge financial advantage, an advantage that didn't need to happen:
For Democrats, the fund-raising environment has improved over the last two years, as Bush has blundered from one legislative or foreign-policy disaster to another and as Democratic donors have seen the prospect of controlling at least one house of Congress — a notion that seemed unthinkable in 2004 — become a possibility. The Democrats who lead their party’s Senate and House campaign committees, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, respectively, have done their parts to make the party competitive. The Democratic Senate committee, which narrowly outperformed its Republican counterpart in 2004, has opened up an even wider margin in this election cycle. The Democratic House committee, which raised only half as much as the G.O.P.’s committee did two years ago, has closed that gap somewhat and, at last count, had virtually the same amount in the bank as its rival. Over at the D.N.C., however, it’s a very different story. In 2004, the D.N.C., under McAuliffe, actually raised slightly more money than the Republican National Committee. Since Dean has taken over, however, the R.N.C. has taken an almost 2-to-1 lead in fund-raising, and going into the fall campaign it had more than $39 million stashed away, compared with just over $11 million for the Democrats. For Schumer and Emanuel, this discrepancy between the two parties is like a train coming down the track, and they’re the ones sitting in its path. The R.N.C. will dump tens of millions of dollars into individual House and Senate races in the closing weeks, through TV ads and get-out-the-vote operations, and Democrats won’t be able to counter it.
Thanks loads, Mouth, and the people who backed you for the job.
