Dean vs. Ahmedinejad: Who's the Looniest Loon?

Howard Dean's quest for fulfillment rivals Ahmedinejad's desire for the Hidden Imam's return. The New Republic's Noam Scheiber examines how Dean may singlehandedly prevent the Democrats from retaking the House and Senate in 2006. Is he aiming for 2008 instead? No, think 2020, because, as Howard the former ski bum describes himself, he's a man of "big ideas." As Scheiber starts out, Dean is a gifted amateur, but may not be ready for prime time:

"Last year, a major Democratic donor from the 2004 presidential campaign received a call from some operatives at Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee (DNC). Dean was coming to town in a few days, they told him, and they wanted to schedule a meeting. Political fund-raisers normally make such calls a month in advance, and so the seat-of-the-pants approach didn't go over well. "You can't call me the week before and say, 'Hey ... we'll be there Monday, want to hang out?'" says the donor. "They had all these fucking hippies.... These are people that are great to raise a few $500 checks, plan a party at a nightclub. But they're not the folks you need to give you [the resources] to do the things you want to do."

Way back in the day, I was a Dem fund-raiser of the $100-check variety. I worked with John Podesta and Howard Ickes before they were even state-wide players. The job of a DNC chair must be unimaginably trying, as Scheiber describes the gymnastics of Dean's predecessor Terry McAuliffe, a veritable ATM for the national campaign who famously wrestled a [large] alligator to get money from a Florida Indian tribe. Scheiber goes on to describe Dean as, eeriely enough, a reincarnation of Gee=mah Carter:

But, of course, we all knew Howard Dean wasn't going to spend his afternoons sipping Bloody Marys with the Diners Club set. In a sense, that was exactly the point. This was a man who, after all, based his insurgent presidential campaign on bashing the party's Washington mandarins. What's so remarkable about Dean's brief tenure at the DNC is not that he's stayed true to his populist roots. It's that he's actually turned the most insider institution in all of Democratic politics into a weapon in his battle against the party establishment.

He spends his days in Vermont weaving webs and staying in DC a day or two a week. His penchant for pronunciamentos on the "Republicans-are-evil" theme and quick-fix nostrums aren't a good fit for winning converts from the moderate middle. You'd think the Dems would realize that a three-headed monster is not what the Dems need for retaking the legislative branch. The DNC Chair should be subordinate to the party panjundrums, not a policy instigator.

Part of the problem lies in the less than stellar qualifications of Reid and Pelosi to capture the national imagination, or even craft an alternative policy. The Wall Street Journal today has an excellent article on how Delay's departure has enabled Appropriations Chair Jerry Lewis, a California spendaholic, from ruining the National Budget to keep his 13 cardinals flush with earmark goodies. Hastert is ineffective and Bush preoccupied with foreign policy demons. As a result, both parties effectively support signing checks on a grander and grander scale, only the Democrats promise to raise taxes to pay for part of the deficit.

So this Fall, the voters face a Hobson's Choice of worse and worser---choose your poison---at the ballot box. Howard Dean is only the most vocal of the reasons for a voter to scream for sanity at the top of the US leadership pile.