“People yelled and carried on”: Howard Dean tells Salon how he remade DNC — and Dems’ new path forwa

[ashling]

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/25/people_yelled_and_carried_on_howard_dean_on_how_he_remade_the_dnc_and_dems_new_path_forward/

The man who implemented a 50-state strategy as DNC chair dishes on how Democrats can take back the country again

My experience from having campaigned and from being governor is that there are Democrats everywhere, and if you want to nurture the party you have to nurture all of them. If you focus only on the states that are mostly Democratic, it’s demoralizing to the other states. So you never get any growth. So the origin of the 50-state strategy was to be prepared to go anywhere. The idea was, if you ever wanted a Mark Begich, you had to invest in Alaska before a Mark Begich came on the horizon so you could be ready. Mark Begich is the example that I use. Nobody expected Ted Stevens to be indicted, but when he was, we were ready. So the origin was to invest in the party throughout the country. There was also another aspect to it. My strategy to win the presidency was to find a way to win without Ohio and Florida. Obama came along and ran an incredible campaign, which was great and very metric-oriented to get votes out. But I was prepared to preside over a Democratic campaign in 2008 where we didn’t win Florida or Ohio, but we win in the West, we’d win in Colorado, possibly Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. That would put us over the top, and would have as well for Kerry in 2004. So, that was another part of it.

[on point]

1. The 50 state strategy also fights the framing and lies of the Repukes

This benefits all dems both short and long term