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Howard Dean was never what you'd call a great speaker.  His applause lines were about substance -- and he wasn't afraid to take on the Democratic establishment.  

Clinton has run a top-down campaign, concentrated on big donors, didn't plan past Super Tuesday and ignored red states. Those have been the typical strategies that have kept the Democrats, a party whose ideas represent the majority of Americans, a minority party.

Dean's fifty-state strategy, as adopted by candidate Obama, is why Clinton has lost eleven straight elections. It's why she hasn't been able to win caucuses. And it's why Obama has been successful.

The Obama campaign is wholly in the same mindset that the Dean campaign pioneered - a mindset that speaks not only to the modalities of grass-roots organizing in the information age, but, even more audaciously :), of a wholly new mechanism for citizen involvement in actual governance, after the election.

Others in this thread have written about how the Obama campaign has worked so hard, and so effectivly on the ground in all 50 states, and how the Clinton campaign has approached this campaign in the typical fashion of trying to target just enough standard demographic groups to get the candidate over the line.

The difference in mentality is striking. How to win an election for a candidate, versus how to build a movement for a party. The mobilization of a million small donors, of tens of thousands of volunteers, of countless points of engagement, especially on the net, the building of an information-age community that will form the popular backbone of support for the new Democratic majority - all this was first pioneered in the Dean campaign and brilliantly extended and built upon by the Obama campaign. The Clinton campaign seems mired in the last century by comparison.

All the bitter talk of Obama as centrist, compared to Dean etc. is not worth much in my estimation. In the end, Howard Dean was not an attractive candidate, certainly not to the Democrats of Iowa, and we all know how his campaign imploded. Obama is an infinitly better candidate, and his positions are not any different than Clinton's on the ideological scale. Given that Clinton was a founding part of the DLC and Obama is not, given how Clinton is slightly more attractive to moderates, given how so much of the non-TL progressive movement has embraced Obama, the argument we see here don't seem very realistic to me. After 8 months of Obama campaigning against John McCain, I strongly suspect that most around here will come to some pretty stark realizations of how completely wrong they have been about Obama.

"Excuse me, I saw Howard Dean in 2003. I admired what he did to give Democrats their fighting spirit back. Barack Obama has no resemblance to the Howard Dean that helped make me proud to be a member of the Democratic Party."

 If you so strongly supported Dean's Democratic Party building values and his 50 state strategy, how can this website possibly support the Clinton  forces who attempted to block his election as chair of the DNC and who so viciously attacked Dean after the success of his 50 state strategy, a sucess which was demonstrated by the winning of a Democratic majority in both houses in the 2006 election.

If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination and thus control over the DNC, Dean and his strategy will be summarily dismissed and his strategy dismantled.

I was a very active Dean supporter in 2004, and a Kucinich then an Edwards supporter for 2008, so I am by no means enthralled by the namby-pamby positions thus far taken by Obama.  

I am not enthralled, but I will vote for him.  Why?  Because Obama was a Dean supporter in 2004 and has publicly supported his 50 state strategy.  Indeed, Obama has used his own 50 state strategy to run a very effective campaign. Clinton and her advisors have eschewed local party building.

A Clinton victory means the return of James Carville and his DLC ilk to control of the DNC, which means a return to the party as a corporate fund-raising department for Republic-lite values.

Dean's policies have elected thousands of progressive Democrats to office in both the state Democratic Parties and state elected offices.  

These are the voices which will determine the future of the Democratic Party for years to come.  Hopefully, this will result in the election of a real Dean Democrat as president in the near future.

Maybe Obama, if he wins, will govern as a Dean Democrat, that is a only a hope. But we can certainly know for sure that Hillary Clinton will not govern as a Dean Democrat.

State Party Chairs sing Dean's praises for his extraordinary leadership and organizational talent. Gone are the days of top down within the Democratic Party. States have regional field reps paid for by Dean's DNC, communication directors for key states are on the DNC payroll and more. Training is provided in every state to understand and use the grassroots approach to win elections.

Dean's organization was noticed by an outsider who wanted to become president. He was not a "within the beltway" thinker, he didn't have the years of being polished into a Washington insider. Like Dean, who'd been a Governor from a small state and was wrapped up in the inexperience argument, this candidate has endured institutional racism his entire life. He has seen the mean streets and moved to help pull others up from the bootstraps. He's worked outside the system more than he ever worked inside the formal Party structure.

The new DNC oganization is fantastic! Those of us who avoided party politics at all costs have given the Dean strategy a chance. People are pouring into our Democratic Headquarters FIRST wanting to take back their country. No national or statewide campigns are in our minds until voters have solidified who the candidates will be. We work together following Dean's organizational plans to strenghten the grass roots organization. It is remarkable and interesting work. Once we have a candidate, we will pull the curtian back and say, "Look what we've done to help you win."

My job and yours is to have a Democrat in the White House. This site has done much to divide and little to unite Democrats.

I knew his specific policies weren't as advanced as I would've liked (especially his health care plan) but he stood up for the issues when almost no one else dared.

However, since he has been in the DNC, Dean set to work on a structural reformation of the Democratic party to favor a 50-state strategy. In that respect, Dean had to define and concentrate on largely nonpartisan reforms that made it possible for insurgent candidates, regardless of their message, to effectively challenge trenchant establishment power in the Democratic party. (My wife and I contributed to that and attended a DNC speech by Dean describing what they were doing, I was a Kerry supporter, she was a Deaniac in our state primary). Perhaps, establishment actors like Carville who opposed the Dean's DNC were not able to distinguish between the substance and the form of Dean's campaign and DNC leadership. But, the DNC effort never seemed partisan in tone or nature or explicit ideology.

So, I see Obama as a consummate DLC candidate who fails to defend liberalism/progressivism or the Democratic party in strong terms despite the fact that he is not a member of the DLC. And, that the 5% of his policies that differs from Clinton and Edwards is what makes his program much, much further to the right of his closest competitors. Substantively he is not Dean. But, while Clinton's campaign early on (it has changed since Feb 4) strategized about which states were winnable and which states were not, Obama built a political coalition around an ideology that transcends state borders and puts him into play in every state. In that respect, the formal technologies of the 50-state strategy that the DNC built proved useful to Obama.

And I opposed him all the way because of this, and so, I am sure, did a lot of other proud Democrats of all alignments, which is why he lost big despite having been made "inevitable" by media coverage.

Amid all the gravity-defying uplift of his campaign, it's easy to forget that Obama is an organizer at heart--a believer in the power of concerted action to bring tangible results. Certainly, that's the way he sees himself. Obama never fails to remind voters of the years he spent as a community organizer in Chicago, calling it "the best education I ever had." He spends several minutes introducing his local field staff at each event, after which he surveys the room for undecided voters and urges supporters to fill out "pledge cards," which help produce a precinct-by-precinct tally of expected votes.

In this respect, the best analogy for Obama may not be a famously inspirational figure like Robert Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy, but the famously disappointing Howard Dean. Like Obama, Dean built a movement on the back of a cutting-edge organization. But it was ultimately the flaws in that same organization that did Dean in. And so, improbable as it may sound, Barack Obama's presidential hopes may hinge not on what he's learned from New Hampshire, but on what he's learned from the Dean campaign.....

.....As it happens, Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, was a longtime friend of Trippi's. Axelrod was sympathetic to Trippi's ideas but hyper-conscious of the Dean campaign's failures. "They aroused a great deal of enthusiasm," Axelrod told me at a recent Obama event. "But I don't think they developed a way to turn [the enthusiasm] into tangible action, into value to the campaign in terms of organization."

There were two failures in particular. The first was that Dean's base was far too narrow. With only a few exceptions, according to a subsequent Pew Research Center poll, the Deaniacs resided on the left of the political spectrum. The problem this created was one of basic math: Once you get that far out of the mainstream, the pool of potential supporters is relatively shallow, meaning you need to claim a large fraction of them in order to succeed.

So, rather than tacking left, the Obama campaign went straight up the middle, where a much larger universe of potential voters awaited. One of the most remarkable political stories of the last generation or so is the rise of a massive bloc of people who, by ideology or disposition, should be voting Democratic but, for whatever reason, aren't. This includes apolitical young people, nominal Democrats who rarely turn out, and, more recently, moderate independents and Republicans like the Vosses. Poll after poll shows that these people favor Democratic positions on most key issues. (The New Republic's John Judis once wrote a book arguing that the last group would help Democrats cement a long-term majority.)