Reply #194: Dean is both. Exhibit A ... [View All]

[Cronopio]

http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5251&pageNum=5

"The “shit” Carville was referring to was the long-running feud between Rahm and Dean, which boiled down to Rahm’s wanting Dean to give him more money—a lot more—and Dean’s refusing to do it. Normally, the chairman of the DNC is installed by party leaders, but after the Democrats’ 2004 debacle, there were no party leaders, and Dean won the chairmanship by winning over the anonymous state-party chairs and much neglected members of the DNC, the folks who actually vote on the matter. The state parties became his base of support, and Dean promised them two things: more money and more power.

It drove Rahm and Carville nuts. “The thing that stuns me,” Carville says, “is that this is supposed to be a rigged deal—chairman of the party! The congressional leadership, the fund-raisers, people like that are supposed to decide. You are supposed to get a call and are told who to vote for! You’re not supposed to really vote on this shit!”

Dean kept his promise and began shoveling money to the state parties—what he described as the “fifty-state strategy”—without regard to whether individual states had competitive races in 2006. The strategy enraged Rahm, and in May he and Senator Chuck Schumer, who ran the Senate campaigns, met with Dean at the DNC to try once again to squeeze cash out of him. The conversation descended into a bitter argument about how Dean was pissing away money, and Rahm, late for a vote in the House, reportedly stormed out of the room in a cloud of profanities.

Rahm had only one more option for pressuring Dean: start leaking to the press. A senior aide to Rahm says Rahm believed that if there were enough newspaper accounts filled with details about how Dean’s stinginess was going to cost Democrats the House, Dean would have to cave. But the stories came and went, and Dean held firm. “What I think Rahm didn’t recognize,” Dean’s aide says, “was that’s exactly the wrong way to move Dean.” In the end, Rahm—or rather his staff¬, because at this point he refused to talk to Dean—had to go crawling back to the DNC chairman and accept Dean’s offer of $2.4 million. Even worse, Dean refused to give the money directly to Rahm. “Governor Dean had concerns that Rahm was going to spend it all on TV,” Dean’s aide says. Instead, it would be funneled through the state parties.

With a month left in the campaign, I ask one of Rahm’s top aides about Dean, and she explodes. “He’s so frustrating. I just don’t like him, anyway. I haven’t liked him from the beginning. It’s totally bizarre dealing with him.

She goes on, “It’s not just that we only got $2.4 million, but we’re also supposed to not say mean things about Howard Dean. And Rahm’s supposed to act like everything’s wonderful.” After the showdown in May, the two men didn’t speak until election night.

The division was not only tactical but also ideological. Since 2004 the Democratic party has divided into two warring camps, the Deaniacs and the Clintonites. On one side are Dean, the state parties, various liberal bloggers, and antiwar activists. They see the Clinton years as a wasted era in which party institutions withered and a White House obsessively focused on winning the next news cycle sold out the traditional values of the Democratic Party and ultimately delivered Congress to the Republicans. On the other side are Rahm and the Clintonites, who strongly believe that the only future for the party is to hew to the ideological middle and are bewildered that the Clinton legacy, successful both in terms of politics (two presidential wins) and results (peace and prosperity), is being second-guessed by their own side."


Dean dealt effectively with Rahm's tactics, which is why Rahm hates his guts.