Well, that didn't take long: The Plank, the blog of the right-leaning DLC organ The New Republic, has an item titled "Putsch at the DNC".
Some big name Democrats want to oust DNC Chairman Howard Dean, arguing that his stubborn commitment to the 50-state strategy and his stinginess with funds for House races cost the Democrats several pickup opportunities.
The candidate being floated to replace Dean? Harold Ford.
Says James Carville, one of the anti-Deaniacs, "Suppose Harold Ford became chairman of the DNC? How much more money do you think we could raise? Just think of the difference it could make in one day. Now probably Harold Ford wants to stay in Tennessee. I just appointed myself his campaign manager."
Notably, Dean is closely identified with the netroots and the fifty-state strategy; both are intent on devolving power away from the Beltway aristocracy, of which Carville is a starring member, besides being a loyal retainer to the Clintons. It's also worth pondering that present conventional wisdom has it that the main obstacle to a Hillary candidacy will be, you guessed it, the netroots and those newly energized state parties.
Carville has been a useful surrogate for the Clintons before, as when he wrote an article for WaPo laying out a rather threadbare case for her electability. It seems reasonable to see the same dynamic at work in this case.
What's truly disgusting about this is this: we lost the Congress in 1994, when you-know-who was President. For the rest of his tenure, no serious effort was made to reverse that defeat; this in part because the Democratic Party was fully focused on saving Bill Clinton's posterior from the republican jihad. In part as a result, the party out there in the country withered, a process that has not been undone until just now. Not to be unkind - or hell, why not - but James Carville's fingerprints were all over that withering.
I'm going to hazard a guess that the rank and file aren't going to be too friendly to this newest Beltway power grab. We've seen what it's like when D.C. runs things, and we don't like it, Mr. Carville. Back off.
