http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31043.htmlAfter four relatively low-profile years pushing the official party line as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Dean is once again the tribune of frustrated liberals. And after he called out President Barack Obama and his congressional allies over their concessions on health care, those close to him predict he’s just getting warmed up...Dean’s health care stand has infuriated party leaders, who have alternately tried to marginalize him and to bring him on board. Yet at the same time, his provocative approach has re-energized the political group he founded and thrilled legions of progressive activists, many of whom were drawn to politics by Dean's insurgent 2004 presidential campaign, then deflated when he didn’t land an Obama Cabinet post.
They have grown increasingly disenchanted with Obama’s presidency and are urging Dean to keep up the drumbeat as the health care debate heads to conference this month; to push Obama to stand more firmly with liberals on other issues; and, if the administration continues to disappoint, to consider challenging Obama in the 2012 Democratic primaries (a far-fetched scenario for which one liberal blogger recently posited Dean was “perfectly positioned”) or — if nothing else — to seek the party’s presidential nomination in 2016, when Obama could be finishing his second term...
In fact, Dean’s resurgence in some ways resembles his meteoric rise to national prominence as a dark-horse presidential candidate whose strident anti-war rhetoric set the left ablaze even as it made Washington Democrats uneasy. This time around, his supporters and allies say, he is even better positioned to channel liberal frustrations, given his health care bona fides. A medical doctor, Dean as governor of Vermont oversaw the creation of a universal health care program for children and pregnant women in that state. But — policy specifics aside — for many supporters, Dean’s harsh December allegations that Obama and Senate Democrats caved to big insurance companies by shelving both a public health insurance option and the Medicare expansion that replaced it – and his much-criticized assertion that “the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House and start the reconciliation process” – brought to mind his 2004 campaign pledge “to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”...“He is going to keep pushing the envelope on health care and some other issues,” said Dean’s brother, Jim Dean, chairman of DFA, which was created from the remnants of his brother’s presidential campaign. “Someone’s got to do it, because a lot of Obama’s core constituencies don’t feel like they’re getting paid attention to right now.”
...On a Florida progressive listserv, one poster urged readers to donate to DFA instead of the DNC, which in the days before the Senate’s pre-Christmas vote to pass health reform, urged the 13 million subscribers on Obama’s campaign e-mail list to call their senators in support of the Senate bill.
After unsubscribing from OFA and pledging to turn his efforts to DFA and another liberal PAC that supports the public option called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, former Obama volunteer and donor Michael Hermann, a Los Angeles musician, told POLITICO: “I find the administration's hubris in thinking they will never lose their liberal base astounding.”
Wendy Sejour, a DFA leader in Homestead, Fla., who is also active in her local Democratic Party, said “what the administration does not understand is that when they try to marginalized Dean and DFA, they insult us and dismiss our hard work. We are the foot soldiers.”
Another DFA volunteer, Patrick Briggs of Pasadena, Calif., said he scrapped plans to become more involved in OFA over what he saw as its health care capitulation. He said Dean’s salvos “reminded some of us in the movement that at least there’s someone out there in the progressive community who’s looking out for our interest.”
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Dean would turn 68 just after election day in 2016.
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THAT WOULD BE JUST ABOUT PERFECT, DON'T YOU THINK?
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