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Dean Puts Boots On The Ground
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Candidate
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| Contributor | COSDem |
| Last Edited | COSDem Jan 06, 2006 01:49pm |
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| Category | General |
| News Date | Friday, January 6, 2006 07:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | "Howard Dean has turned out to be the biggest surprise of the season. He's a good man. And he truly gets it."
Those are the words of Charles Soechting, the TX Dem chair who when Dean announced his bid for DNC chair had Soechting grtting his teeth. At the time, the Texan worried that Dean didn't get the problems parties grappled with and certainly didn't possess the regional sympathy to figure out how to win elections in the South.
But now, closing in on Dean's 1st anniversary as DNC chair, Soechting has seen enough to convince him that Dean "knows what it to makes Texas truly competitive."
Veterans of Dem politics who work on state and local campaigns are eager to praise Dean. In part, that's because Dean has devoted the bulk of the DNC's staff, energy and time to fulfilling his chairman's campaign promise: to revitalize the Dem Party at the precinct level.
Dem strategists in DC often ask their colleagues: "What is Dean good for?" They moan that he's not raising as much as money as they expected or his surrogates promised; that he hasn't been Joe Trippi-like and revolutionized the party's small donor outreach; that he can't shut his liberal mouth. Dean's admirers have ready counter-arguments, but they've lacked something tangible to bat down the critics. But now, they say, the party's investment in states is beginning to pay off. [MARC AMBINDER]
There are approximately 1,963 election precincts in WV. At the beginning of '05, the state Dem Party could only identify six with active Dem organizers. Twenty years ago, WV Dems abandoned their precinct-level party building operations. Part of the problem was parochial: precinct chairs didn't trust county chairs, who didn't trust the elites running the state party, who certainly didn't trust the effete liberals running the national party. The cycle of neglect desiccated what organization remained. |
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