And the douchebag of the day award goes to Jonatahan Chait...
Echoing the idiot myopia of the official organs of reactionary centrism - the New Republic, the Washington Post, et al - Jonathan Chait writes in today's LA Times that Howard Dean is a horrible (horrible!) choice for DNC chair.
"The conventional rap against Dean as DNC chairman is essentially the same as the conventional rap against him as presidential candidate a year ago. Namely, he reinforces all the party's weaknesses. Democrats need to appeal to culturally traditional voters in the Midwest and border states who worry about the party's commitment to national security. Dean, with his intense secularism, arrogant style, throngs of high-profile counterculture supporters and association with the peace movement, is the precise opposite of the image Democrats want to send out.
The conventional rap is completely right. But, in a way, Dean is even less suited to run the DNC than he is to run for president."
Yawn.
It's amusing to hear the surviving remnants of the 1980s and 1990s backlash liberal movement, including Mr. Chait, bloviate about Howard Dean's candidacy for DNC chair. It is they however that are in fact slouching towards irrelevance. What Chait and his cohorts in the Washington political and media establishment don't seem to understand is that Howard Dean brings to the table not simply anti-war ire, and true blue cultural liberalism, but a fighting, tell-it-like-it-is populism, clarity, spontaneity, and spine that is as vital to the long-term resurrection of the national Democratic Party as Goldwaterism, and the cult of personality around the man, was to the revival of the GOP. As de facto national spokesperson for the party (did you not feel embarrassed by Pelosi and Reid the other night?) he will on occasion say some foolish and even unpopular things, just as Goldwater did, but when Democrats control the levers of power a generation from now in Washington, Dean and the grassroots movement he spawned, will like Goldwater before him be regarded as the apostle of their revival. America will be led in a new direction, beginning now, and Democrats will one day be glad they did not rely upon the staid, unimaginative voices coming from the Washington political and media establishment, from congressional Democrats to the Washington Post and the New Republic, and from the likes of Mr. Chait.