Did Dean Do It?

Well, yay.

But it's curious that in all the self-congratulation I've heard from Democrats and the various media mouths, I haven't heard Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean's name mentioned once. (I know he was on The Daily Show last night, but I haven't yet had a chance to watch it.) All the attention was going to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Clinton-era insider who oversaw the national Congressional effort, and to Chuck Schumer, Emanuel's counterpart in the Senate. It's deserved praise, to be sure, but still it seemed a bit peculiar that Dean wasn't being mentioned. Can it be a coincidence that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid had both opposed Dean's chairmanship? (I'm not trying to spin out some kind of conspiracy theory here, I'm just trying to give some credit where it might be due.)

There was an interesting article in the New York Times last month about Dean, in which writer Matt Bai followed Dean to Alaska as he sought to further implement his "fifty-state strategy." The basis of the idea, according to Mr. Bai (paraphrasing Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher), is simple: "...Democrats do better with rural and small-town voters when they frame their positions as values rather than as policy prescriptions. This is not an entirely new insight, but to Dean it is critically important. In his mind, it means that any voter in any state can be a Democrat, if only you bother to talk to him, and if only you make the right kind of argument." And after the upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, as demographics and political allegiances shifted, the once-mighty Democratic machine started ceding whole swaths of the country's electorate to the Republicans. Instead of adapting to the new reality their focus narrowed, a little bit at a time, election after election, finally reaching the point that during the 2004 election, 18 states were completely ignored by John Kerry and the Democratic Party.

Dean sought to do a 180 on that idea, hence the fifty-state strategy. Even places like Alaska, a sparsely-populated state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1, needed Democratic party organizers on the ground, raising money and directing it to the right places. I won't summarize Mr. Bai's main points any more than that, instead just referring you again to his article, but will instead pivot to my own main point:

How much of the responsibility for this historic Democratic sweep belongs to Howard Dean?

Obviously, there are certain realities this election cycle that weren't so real just two years ago: the disgust of the electorate with just about every aspect of the Bush White House is plainly the dominant factor. Republican scandals that just kept on comin' had a hell of a lot to do with it, too. And without the public perception that the wheels were coming off the Republican train, Dean's strategy might have died an early death: it was dependent upon raising a sufficient amount of money to fund all those new state organizations, and without local Democrats getting excited about their prospects and therefore donating more money to the cause, Dean could never have executed his grand plan. (Indeed, as Bai reports, the Congressional fund-raising wings of the party were much more successful at keeping parity with their Republican counterparts than Dean's apparatus was--which is why the Republicans were able to spend so much more money on advertising in the last days of the campaign. Not that it ended up helping.)

There were significant gains in states like Iowa, Kansas and Colorado, which the conventional wisdom would have listed as solidly red states, the kind where a party doesn't bother wasting money because there's no way for a Democrat to win. And again, a lot of that can be attributed to the Republican implosion (what effect, for example, did the Ted Haggard debacle have in his home state of Colorado?), but how much did it help that there was a stronger Democratic field organization already in place in Colorado, and in Kansas and Iowa and elsewhere, to take advantage of such opportunities when they arose?

Remember: only a few months ago, conventional wisdom proclaimed that the chances of Democrats taking back the House were fair to decent, with a 15-seat gain "within the realm of possibility," but that retaking the Senate was nearly impossible. But more and more races--in more and more unlikely states--just kept opening up. And the party was able to capitalize on a big percentage of those opportunities.

So I'm just asking: with all due thanks to Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, how much should we also be thanking the outsider who no one else seems to be thanking?

(P.S. Sidney Blumenthal's post-election dissection of the "house of kitsch" that is the Bush Administration is extraordinary. I hadn't seen these clowns in this light before, but I think Blumenthal nails it.)