The Dean LegacyBy MATT BAI
Back when he was a rising phenomenon in Iowa and New Hampshire, Howard Dean used to revel in reeling off the names of the various politicians to whom journalists had taken to comparing him: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George McGovern, even Barry Goldwater. (I myself, writing in The New York Times Magazine, drew a parallel between Dr. Dean and Jerry Brown.) But as Dr. Dean's once-soaring campaign lost altitude over the dairy farms of Wisconsin during the last month, Dr. Dean took to invoking a more distant historical figure: Robert LaFollette, Wisconsin's iconic early 20th century governor and senator, whose name is synonymous with progressivism.
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.... Dr. Dean seemed to be suggesting that even in defeat, his campaign was somehow larger than its delegate count. Indeed, this is the conventional wisdom that now surrounds Dr. Dean — that by engaging new voters and reigniting passion among his rivals, something he undisputedly achieved, Dr. Dean will leave a tyrannosaur-like footprint on the Democratic Party and the political system as a whole......Dr. Dean had this much in common with "Fighting Bob": both men saw their presidential ambitions disintegrate in the course of a single disastrous speech.....But LaFollette's legacy as a reformer outlived that catastrophe, and there is a reason for that.....What will be Dr. Dean's lasting contribution to party or country?
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....Dr. Dean can hardly claim to have laid the rails for some powerful engine of change. His campaign, as he never tired of reminding us, was about "taking the country back," which seemed another way of saying it was basically about winning. There was a moment, just after much of the Democratic establishment appeared to embrace his candidacy in December, when the Dr. Dean could have done something truly special in American politics. The party and the campaign were his to mold. He could have risen above his own partisan rhetoric to become the "uniter" that President Bush had promised to be.....
He didn't.
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In the end, the tragedy of Howard Dean's impressive grass-roots campaign is that he will be remembered not for any lasting reform agenda, but for the missed opportunity to create one.http://www.nytimes.com/pages/politics/trail/index.html