Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party. <\/p>\n
“He told me he was thinking about it,” Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor’s failed presidential bid. <\/p>\n
Dean was traveling Monday in New York and unavailable for comment. His spokeswoman, Laura Gross, said “it was far too early to be speculating on that. The election was less than a week ago.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A lot of people I’ve heard from in DC, as well as several bloggers, have been playing this possibility up for about a week now and the speculation appears to have captured Dean’s attention. That’s a good thing; he’d be great at the job.<\/p>\n
Despite his flaws and shortcomings, of which there are many, Dean brings attributes that fit the DNC chair job perfectly — he fires up the party base, he has a proven record of raising money, he’s committed to aggressive grassroots organizing, and has a no-nonsense attitude that would take on the GOP head-on, without hesitation. In other words, the man is a money-raising pit bull.<\/p>\n
Of course, taking the job would mean not running for president again in ’08.
\n<\/p>\n
Grossman said that if Dean were to run for DNC chair, he would need to pledge that he would serve the full four-year term, thus ruling out a presidential bid in 2008.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As far as I’m concerned, this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. Dean would have far greater success as a DNC chairman than presidential candidate.<\/p>\n
If Dean decides not to pursue the post, and\/or the DNC rejects his bid, other names in the mix include the NDN’s Simon Rosenberg, Donna Brazile, Gov. Tom Vilsack, and former Clinton aide Harold Ickes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Long-time readers may recall that I had a few, shall we say, “concerns” about Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. It wasn’t that the man was without strengths; it was that those qualities were not well suited for a presidential candidate. Those traits are, however, terrific for a party chairman. Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}