After their devastating loss to President George W. Bush on Election Day, one would think the Democrats would go into a period of self-reflection and self-evaluation to try and determine what exactly caused their defeat at the polls.  Instead, they have taken the exit polls showing Senator John Kerry with sizable leads and insisted that somehow Bush corrupted the election results and transformed the sizable deficit he was facing in the ballot box into a victory.

As part of this delusional theory of being victimized by Republicans and a rightward-slanted media, there emerges a fresh face and fresh voice to replace Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe when his term expires next year.  He is a man who represents the liberal schism of the Democratic party and whose promises and unabashed liberalism demonstrate even more effectively the complete disconnect that the Democrats have with the normal people in the rest of society.

Who is this contender?  None other than former presidential candidate and Vermont governor Howard Dean.  For my part, I’m rooting for the guy.  As chairman, there’s no telling what kind of havoc he could wreak and what sort of long-term benefits he could single-handedly offer to the conservative movement in America.

McAuliffe is certainly finished.  A Clinton plant, he has been wholly ineffective in leading his party back from Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America revolution in 1994.  Since then, the Democrats have consistently lost Congressional and Senatorial seats to Republicans – even in the recent mid-term elections when the president’s party traditionally loses seats.  Under McAuliffe’s “steady” leadership, Tom Daschle lost his bid for reelection.  To have the leader of either party lose a reelection attempt is a nearly unprecedented occurrence in American politics.  This is McAuliffe’s record, and it certainly isn’t one that he can be proud of.  The only accomplishment McAuliffe has in his post-President Clinton tenure is solidify Senator Hillary Clinton’s chances to run for the presidency as the savior of her party.

Not that Dean necessarily offers a better alternative.  This was a man who simply couldn’t hack it as a genuinely electable presidential candidate.  What makes the Democrats believe he is capable of taking over the reins of the Democratic party and somehow or other leading them to victory?  He claimed to be the ultra-left candidate representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic party,” yet their 2004 nominee was a man who, by comparison, seem like a far-right conservative.  There is a contradiction here that the Democrats cannot simply ignore.  They need to decide if they are the party of the staunch Leftists or not.

Dean’s problem, like that of the modern Democratic party, is that they are devoutly liberal and publicly unashamed of their status.  Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with being liberal, except that the majority of American people are moderates.  They don’t generally identify themselves as socialists or staunch liberals any more than they identify themselves as staunch conservatives.  To have a committee chairman who runs his party from the Left may jeopardize what little traction the Democrats have left in Washington’s political scene after losing two presidential races and losing Senate and Congressional seats.

To his credit, however, Dean would likely be able to reinvent the Democratic party as something other than the party of the Clintons.  Those two need to fade into history where they rightfully belong.  The other front-runners for the chairman’s slot include Harold Ickes, a former Clinton aide; Donna Brazile, Gore’s campaign chairwoman; and Tom Vilsack, liberal Iowan governor.

How Dean would fare against the other Clinton Democrats nationwide remains to be seen, and his efficacy as chairman would certainly be tested by the opposition he would likely get from the former president’s allies nationwide.  Nevertheless, Dean would certainly bring fresh ideas to the party and not be constantly trying to reinvent their candidates as some incarnation of President Clinton – or worse, pulling the former president out of recovery to stump on the campaign trail in some last ditch effort to garner sympathetic Democratic votes.

For better or for worse, Dean is probably the only chairman candidate capable of changing the Democratic party’s Clinton mindset, and that cannot be a bad thing in the long run for the party, one that has consistently lost ground ever since Clinton entered the Oval Office and lost it even more rapidly since he left it.

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