An Ode To Howard Dean

Crowds 100,000 strong are chanting Obama! Obama! Obama! at rallies in what were traditionally known as red states in the last week. Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia were safe for the GOP, or so said the pundits and pollsters from both sides of the aisle. Yet there was one man and one movement behind him that believed there was another way, his name is Howard Dean. The focus has been on the candidates recently and rightly so, but the man behind the scenes and the DNC was the one who not only introduced the 50-state strategy but blasted it through the thick minded conventional wisdom.

CNN's Roland Martin thinks it's about time for some apologies:

(CNN) -- If Sen. Barack Obama is able to prevail over Sen. John McCain on Tuesday, all of those Democrats who ripped Howard Dean's 50-state strategy over the last four years should call the head of the Democratic National Committee and offer a heartfelt apology.

First in line should be New York Sen. Charles Schumer, Chicago, Illinois, Rep. Rahm Emanuel and my CNN colleague, political strategist James Carville.

When Democrats were in the final stages of winning back Congress in 2006, those three were at odds with Dean, saying he should forget about his pie-in-the-sky plan to have the Democratic Party competitive in all 50 states.

They reasoned that money spent on get-out-the vote efforts in non-congressional elections was futile, and all the effort should be on reclaiming Congress.

But Dean resisted their suggestions, weathering repeated calls for him to resign after that election.

Thank god he didn't resign. That would have been the worst thing for our party looking for an identity other than "Republican-lite." While Obama is certainly offering change in this crucial election, a lot of that gets done on the ground with organizers who GOTV day in and day out. If we were stuck in a 2004 mentality, the party would have called for a multi-state strategy but only in what they deemed swing states. Last time around that number was 17, far short of the fifty the Democrats are operating in now.

Also, a lot of what Obama is doing across the country is modeled on Dean's successes with online organizing and a small donor army that is providing for a full-on saturation across the nation. While we probably won't win states like Mississippi, Texas and Utah this year, victories can still be seen there on the local level. Like the defeated Republicans of the 1960s, they slowly but surely built themselves from the bottom-up in order to control school boards and county positions that eventually turned into Congressional, Senatorial and Gubernatorial seats. And today, thanks to Dean, we are replicating those strategies but putting progressive policies back into practice. People have been hurting under conservative control for far too long and they are certainly ready for change, and thanks to Howard, it is able to reach them from one coast to the other and leaving nothing open in the middle.