The Doctor Is In

It looks as if Dean will, indeed, win the chairmanship of the DNC when the vote comes up in a couple weeks. I definitely support his candidacy for the position and hope that he focuses on an aspect of the party that seems to have been neglected in the last 12 years or so: the field team.

Unless you're the Yankees, you can't build a successful major league team without a deep farm system. The farm system is where you cultivate the talent that will keep your team competitive in the years ahead, when current stars reach the end of their careers. So it is with politics, as well, and it's an area the Dems really need to focus on if they want to be successful in the future.

When I was working on the Kerry campaign, something that really struck me was the lack of top-down support of local and lower office candidates within the Democratic party. As a party, we need to have a strong farm system. A system for grooming the higher level candidates of the next generation, and a system that gives the Dems some authority on the community and county level.

I recall a trip I took to the county voting services office with the lead attorney for Kerry in my area. Our goal was to test the punch-card machines and head off any potential chad-related problems before they happened on November 2. What struck me was the lack of any Democrats holding key positions in any of the elected county offices relating to voting and counting the vote. The GOP had them locked up tight, and we had a fight to make sure that there was bipartisan oversight of the counting and sorting process once the votes were delivered to the headquarters.

Dean needs to stress the development of the grassroots of the party in the way that he did when he was running for President. There are so many places in this country that have strong, but dormant, blue streaks, just waiting to be woken up by some individual attention from the party. I saw this with my own eyes in numerous areas of my county during the election. In places that Gore had not bothered to look in 2000, we found thousands of votes and an upswelling of support. We need to contest every state in national elections, and fight for votes everywhere. To concede entire states as lost, in the way we have been as a party, is folly, and it isn't the way to re-establish a Democratic majority.