Democrats to Dean: You the man!

By last weekend, Howard Dean had locked up enough of the 447 votes within the Democratic National Committee to all but assure his ascendancy to party chairman. While the ballots won’t officially be cast until Feb. 12, Dean’s competitors dropped out in the wake of his surge.

Dean’s coronation on Saturday will be a tad ironic, considering his candidacy for presidency last year was based in no small part on bashing the very party he will now lead. Whether or not the assessment is accurate, Dean gained a reputation during the presidential campaign as a hotheaded liberal. Remember his remarks about wanting votes from “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks”?

But Georgians who are among the voting members of the DNC say that if Dean didn’t exactly mesh with Southern voters as a presidential candidate, he’ll do much better as DNC chairman.

“We could bring Howard Dean to Georgia, put him in a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, bring him to a barbecue place and he’d fit right in,” says Lonnie Plott, one of the seven Georgians who will vote in Saturday’s DNC election. “The persona the press put on him is not Howard Dean. He’s not shrill. He’s not over the top. He’s articulate. He has strong views.”

Dean supporters hope the former Vermont governor will apply the grassroots tactics that made him a one-time Democratic presidential front-runner toward supporting Democrats in local races across the country. Democrats are also counting on Dean to do what Karl Rove and the Republicans have been so effective at: identifying supporters and mobilizing them to go to the polls.

LaToia Jones, a Georgia State University student who, as vice-president of the College Democrats of America, is a DNC voting member, wants Dean to leverage his popularity among young voters to bring new and younger blood to the party.

But most importantly, in the wake of Republican domination in both state and national races, Democrats say Dean needs to do a better job staking out what his party stands for.

“We’re more concerned about us defining who we are,” says Richard Ray, a DNC voting member and president of the Georgia AFL-CIO, “instead of the Republicans defining who we are.”

Says Plott: “Republicans didn’t give everybody Social Security. But they’re trying to take it away. The Republicans didn’t give us civil rights legislation. But they’re trying to weaken it.”??






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