If she sticks us with Carville or Begala as DNC chair, what do we do about it? If Dean isn't on board for another four years, who might we try to get to replace him?
http://www.alternet.org/stories/58978/Even here in western North Carolina, where Republicans have proliferated since the Civil War (when the woods were full of Union sympathizers rather than pro-lifers), Wilkes County -- Bible-thumping, economically slumping -- has stood out for its fire-and-brimstone conservatism. It's been a stiff challenge to find folks willing to run against the Republicans. Hell, it's been rare to hear anybody publicly admit to being a Democrat. "You've got a lot of people in this county who probably couldn't tell you if they've ever met one," Sloop says.
But in a scene playing out this year all across "red America," from these lush hills to the craggy outcroppings of the Mountain West, previously unfathomable crowds of Democrats are streaming up the steps of the old county courthouse, past bobbing blue balloons and Welcome Democrats! signs. They're hopping mad about the national state of things but simultaneously giddy with a new-found hope -- finally! -- for their party.
Inside, as the courtroom fills up, three symbols of the new spirit bustle around. There's trim old Clyde Ingle, a onetime Hubert Humphrey campaigner who "finally just got tired of sitting up there in Deep Gap and complaining." Ingle and his wife, Eva, have spent the past couple of years cajoling shy Wilkes County Democrats to "come out of the closet," get organized and active.
Then there's Mark Hufford, a young, towheaded bundle of energy who's been helping Democrats win breakthrough elections as a field organizer. And there's white-haired, wisecracking "Uncle Bob" Johnston, who retired to Wilkes from upstate New York and promptly found himself being talked into the party chairmanship. "You've got to be in trouble when you're asking an 80-year-old Yankee to run things," he quips.
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The single oddest thing about the fifty-state strategy is surely the adjective often attached to it: "controversial."
Just how, exactly, could there be controversy over a national political party organizing nationally -- especially after years of pissing billions into an ever-shrinking "target" slice of the country, ceding wider and wider chunks of territory and disdaining the grassroots while Republicans built a powerful army of ground troops?
The DNC's fifty-state project is relatively inexpensive, compared with the costs of the thirty-second TV ad blitzes the party has increasingly relied on to target voters in Ohio and Florida. Salaries for the state parties run to about $8 million annually, considerably less than 10 percent of the DNC's budget and downright humble compared with what the GOP and its affiliates spend for similar party work.In just two years, the belated catch-up effort has paid off in at least two tangible ways: It has exponentially multiplied grassroots party involvement and -- in a short-term benefit not even envisioned by its architects -- has helped win an impressive number of state, local and Congressional elections in majority-Republican regions.
<snip>
The real fear is that a second Clinton presidency would mean a return to the Washington-centric ways of the first -- to party control by "the very people who ground down the activist base in the 1990s and have continued to hold the party's grassroots in utter contempt," as Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos wrote in the Washington Post. The harshest public critics of Dean's strategy are also among Hillary Clinton's most trusted advisers: Emanuel, Carville, Begala.
As Thomas Edsall reported in The New Republic last year, many top Clintonites so loathe and mistrust Dean that their campaign is "laying the groundwork to circumvent the DNC." There is talk of Clinton's team keeping its own field staff with the campaign after winning the primaries, rather than shifting them under the auspices of the DNC for the general election, as has been standard practice. "The DNC is going to be peripheral" if Hillary wins the nomination, one Clinton aide said.
Clinton acolyte Harold Ickes Jr. has raised millions for a private voter database, to avoid relying on the DNC's.
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