The Prophet (Page 2)

Indiana is a good example. When Dan Parker became chair of the state party in November 2004, his first order was to slash his staff in half after Democrats lost the governor's mansion. Indiana, like so many states, had been written off by the national party--the last Democratic presidential contender to carry it was Lyndon Johnson. But Dean gave Parker the money to hire three field organizers and a full-time communications director, the first the state had ever had. (When Dean came in, thirty states had no such important position.) In 2006 that staff worked on three competitive Congressional races long before the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) arrived. The party picked up all three seats that year and elected a record number of Democratic mayors in 2007. By the time the Democratic primary rolled around this past May, Hoosier Dems had been revitalized, and Obama--to the surprise of many--invested heavily in the state, visiting forty-nine times. On November 4 Obama won Indiana--a state John Kerry lost by twenty points--by 26,000 votes. "We're a poster child for the fifty-state strategy," Parker says.

If Indiana was ignored by the national party, then a place like Alaska--5,000 miles from Washington--didn't exist. Dean was roundly mocked, including in a New York Times Magazine profile, for visiting and investing in the Last Frontier. "The idea that you're going to put money in a place like Alaska seemed insane," Dean says, "because you could take the same amount of money and maybe win a House seat in California with it. That was the thinking here. The problem is, that's a totally short-term strategy." The DNC's investment increased the size of the Alaska party staff from one to four. More important, "it made Alaskans proud to be Democrats again," says state chair Patti Higgins. When opportunity struck, as Dean predicted, Democrats were ready. "It doesn't look so dumb now that Ted Stevens got indicted [in July] and today we have a Democratic senator from Alaska," Dean says. "But without a voter list and a party that knows what it's doing and is well trained and staffers that are up there for four years, we don't win that seat, plain and simple." Not only did former Anchorage mayor Mark Begich knock off Stevens; Democrats ran their strongest challenge yet to Alaska's lone Congressman, Don Young, who's held the seat for thirty-five years, and polls showed Obama leading in the state before John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate. Now the party is focused on ousting Palin from the governor's mansion in 2010. When I spoke to Higgins, she was heading to a press conference to denounce Palin, who was campaigning in Georgia that day, as "AWOL from Alaska."

Transferring power away from Washington, not surprisingly, didn't sit well with many Beltway power brokers, who wanted DNC money spent on TV ads in targeted races. Dean's clashes with DCCC head Rahm Emanuel are now the stuff of legend. "I know how hard it was and the kind of criticism he took, when all they wanted the DNC to do was raise money and send it downstairs to the DCCC and across the street to the Democratic Governors Association and down the block to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee," recalls Donna Brazile. "And Dean said no: we're going to play, we're going to have a role, we're going to be a part of this."

Dean's doggedness became a virtue. The 2006 takeover of Congress, when Dems captured seats in many under-the-radar conservative districts, silenced the doubters, including Emanuel. When James Carville suggested after the election that Dean be replaced by right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council chair Harold Ford Jr., Dean called his remaining critics remnants of the "old Democratic Party." He was right. "Dean won the argument, there's no doubt about it," says Elaine Kamarck, an influential DNC member and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Rahm was the beneficiary of Dean's strategy," Brazile says. "He would never admit it, but the fact that we put organizers in Indiana, put organizers in Mississippi, put organizers out West, that helped him build the supermajority we have today on Capitol Hill." (Asked by talk-show host D.L. Hughley if he felt "vindicated," Dean joked, "I might have been right, but I'd rather be chief of staff.")

Almost nobody is questioning the fifty-state strategy anymore. Dean's popularity among party activists has never been greater. At a December DNC meeting in San Diego, party leaders from New Hampshire to Kansas to Nevada spoke about how their states had been transformed, with Dean's help, in under four years. The state chairs passed a resolution praising Dean for taking "on all foes to defend the inherent brilliance" of the fifty-state strategy, and calling him "the most successful Democratic chairman in decades." (He's certainly the least pretentious: Dean took the same JetBlue red-eye back to New York as I did. "I only take red-eyes," he told me as we boarded.)

If '06 hinted at the strategy's potential, then '08 proved its wisdom and importance. "All the things they did to prepare the party for 2008 as part of the fifty-state strategy made the transition to the general election much easier for us," says Obama strategist Tewes. Across the country, during a prolonged Democratic primary, the party registered, recruited and turned out a record number of Democrats, independents and even Republicans. On May 10, after virtually clinching the nomination, Obama launched a huge, fifty-state voter registration drive. The numbers were astonishing: in North Carolina alone, the party registered 800,000 new voters between January and election day. The total number of new voters registered in the nine formerly red states that Obama carried eclipsed the margin of victory in each of those states. With his state-of-the-art organization, seemingly limitless resources and message of change and inclusion, Obama became the first candidate in a long time to run a genuinely national campaign, with offices and engaged volunteers in every state until the very end.

Obama's success at building a national organization across the map, from the bottom up, surprised even Dean. "I thought we needed a long-term business plan, and we needed to stick to it," Dean says. "Little did I know we were going to have this incredibly charismatic candidate who would do it all in four years. I have to say it happened a lot faster than I thought it would." Now even Republicans, having seen their strongholds reduced to the Deep South, want to emulate Dean, with candidates for RNC chair proposing their own version of the fifty-state strategy.

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