Dean and the DNC?

So Howard Dean has made it official. He's running for DNC Chair. The question is, will he reform the Dems or will the Dem establishment co-opt him?

I've only been a Deaniac for a little over a year, having jumped on his bandwagon only after Senator Graham withdrew from the Democratic nomination race and I started to look for an alternative to Bush that I could live with. Even then it was only Carla's coaxing that got me to look at Dean. I'd bought into the media spin about Dean being an ultra-liberal and I wasn't interested in having an ultra-liberal President, much less voting for one. But, she got my curiosity up and I started poking around to see what I could find. I quickly ran across the Dean Independents Blog, which is where I met Scott. It didn't take long before I realized that Dean was the real deal AND that the spin about Dean was mostly empty assertions.

That the Democratic Party establishment didn't back Dean simply served to make him a more attractive candidate in my eyes. The last thing I wanted, as an Indie, was a President who was more beholden to the special interests that got him there than he was to those who he was elected to serve.

I got to meet Howard Dean a few months ago at a book signing in Portland. I bought a copy of each of his books to give to Carla, who collects political memorabilia associated with Presidential candidates. Mostly I just wanted to meet Dean and having him sign a book was guaranteed to get me at least a few seconds of his time and attention. I took advantage of it to remind him that he has Indies among his supporters and that many of us have no intention of becoming Democrats... that what he's fighting for is larger than just the Democratic Party. He agreed emphatically.

I'm not at all excited at the prospect of Dean becoming DNC Chair. Maybe he would be able to reform the Democrats from the inside. If so, then more power to them. I have neither the desire nor the intention of becoming a Democrat either way. I just don't want to see Dean become just one more cog in a party machine that's more interested in acquiring and maintaining power than anything else as far as I can tell.