Howard Dean will be remembered as a great Party Chair

ILLUSTRATED: Party building should be done equitably, Campaign support should be done efficiently.
Party insiders are upset with how Howard Dean is spending DNC money. Here is why Dean is right:
Comparing party building and campaign support is like comparing apples and oranges. There should be a double standard in the approach to how resources are used. With parties, think equity, with campaigns, think efficiency.
Parties are permanent, they need to be robust in every state. No matter how small the county, every Democratic voter in America should be within a 1-hour’s drive from a Democratic field office, year-round every year. I call it the Red County Bill of Rights, rural people should be entitled to party support. With party support, then over time, candidates will come up the ranks from school boards and be running for high office. It took the GOP 30 years form the Goldwater defeat to take Congress. But they started by putting operatives in Democratic states and training candidates for their careers, not the next election.
Campaigns are fleeting, they disappear after Election Day. Therefore, campaign funds and resources ought to be strategically used. I worked for Kerry as a volunteer in California, and had many arguments with people who wanted the Kerry campaign to be a gravy train to help local efforts (Hint: that’s the party’s job and it wasn’t doing it until Dean started changing things).

Let Howard Dean do his job which is to build up the party from the grassroots, in all 50 states. This is a 20 year plan, not a 2006 plan.