Should Howard Dean be the next DNC Chair?
Let's get something straight first. Howard Dean doesn't need the DNC Chair position. The Democratic Party needs Howard Dean, his vision, his pragmatism, and his fearlessness to fight for core progressive ideals. The real question is "Where can Howard Dean make the biggest impact at reforming the Democratic Party?"
My e-friend, Bill Scher, who writes for www.LiberalOasis.com, advised Howard Dean not to take the DNC Chair ("Memo to Howard Dean," Nov. 9, 2004 http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/110704.htm#110904). Mr. Scher suggests "there's another job that's currently open that desperately needs to be filled...: Strategist and [butt]-Kicker At-Large (note editorial standards won't allow use of the 'A' word), or SAKAL for short. Only one other person has been a SAKAL, and it was for the other team in the early 1990s... Bill Kristol."
Kristol never ran for or held public elected office, but he's credited with making the biggest impact in reviving the contemporary GOP. Mr. Scher points out that
in the early 1990s, during the period when the GOP was completely out of power, [Kristol] hung his shingle on a different mini-think tank, the Project For The Republican Future. From there, he wielded great power by churning out combative strategy memos for the minority leadership, and buffeting those memos by being a constant media presence.
...Kristol, while fairly connected, was not fully welcomed ... by the GOP leadership. He muscled his way in. The House Minority Leader at the time, Bob Michel, was notoriously timid. (His whip, Newt Gingrich, was another matter).
Howard Dean fits the requirements of a Democratic Party SAKAL and has the charisma to build a network of progressive analysts and blogs to do for Democrats what Kristol's think tank did for the Republicans.
The other opinion is that reform will happen quicker if Howard Dean helms the DNC. The theory being that Howard could pull the Party back to its core values while the margins of the Democratic Party push. This push-me-pull-you strategy is a very tempting theory.
Social scientists look for "critical mass" when studying how and when social change happens. It's like fetal scientists studying a pair of healthy fetuses and looking for what triggered one to develop into a healthy newborn and another deformed or stillborn. Most reforms begin at the periphery of society not the middle because the margins are interacting with a changing environment and most likely to face a crisis before the center. The center, content with the status quo, resists change until it's breached by a life-altering crisis or the "fringe's" persistence makes their ideas appealing to the "mainstream."
If the majority of the DNC members don't see a problem with the Democratic Party asis, or if they think that the Party needs to chase the Republicans to the right of the political spectrum, then Howard Dean as DNC Chair will be a frustrating exercise for everyone and detrimental to reform.
The greatest danger of Howard Dean becoming DNC Chair is that his vision would be co-opted by the GOP-appeaser Democrats, like John Kerry did to Dean's 2004 campaign message.
The purpose of co-option by opponents of change is to neuter change by assimilating the aspects of a movement that least threatens the existing power structure and having the Establishment parrot the movement's ideas until their true origins and intent are lost.
If being DNC Chair means that Howard Dean has to bridle his tongue when it's needed to verbally lash the Neo-con Republicans for their mean-spirited and fraudulent policies and to whip the GOP-appeaser Democrats when they betray Democratic ideals and the public trust, then I suggest that Howard Dean decline the DNC Chair position and continue to use his PAC, Democracy For America, as the SAKAL vehicle to reform the Democratic Party. In Dean's case, freedom of speech is a mandatory requirement to encourage positive reform of the Democratic Party.
posted by Hopewellian_Magi @ 9:29 AM
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