Chris Cilliza and Perry Bacon report on the travesty that Governor Howard Dean is without a job.  Anyone who's been reading us for a while knows that I have a high opinion of Governor Dean, so you shouldn't be surprised to find out that I am rather angry at the treatment that our party is choosing to give Dean. Let me say it up front: without the Governor, we would have had no victories in 2006 and 2008. 

There's plent more below the fold.

For a bunch of data geeks like us, Dean is our absolute hero.  After firing the team of idiots who built the first voter file, Dean came up with an amazing plan to create a new voter file and a new series of relationships with the state parties.  In addition to just being badly designed and implemented the file that the Data Warehouse team developed was just a file that the DNC had and shared with committees. Whoopty-doo, the DSCC had access to some really bad data that that were organized badly and stored on bad technology.   Dean changed all of that.  Not only did he hire good people who knew what they were doing, but he used the new national file as a way of developing relationships with the state parties.  All that the states had to do was give the DNC their existing files and updates, and and the DNC would enhance the data, do all the analytics work to expand the file, and give the file back to the states.  The important thing to note here is that it's not just that Dean gave us a better product: he used the product as a way of embracing existing relationship, developing new ones and overcoming outright hostility that state parties had towards the national party. In politics, lists are everything: if you know the right people to call, email or mail, you can get just about anything going. The fact that Dean was willing to give the states the DNC's data was a huge act of trust, and it engendered massive goodwill.

It wasn't just the data themselves, though, or the relationships that he created with the state parties.  The web interface that they commissioned, VoteBuilder, was absolutely brilliant.  Whether or not people realize this, the file would have been functionally useless if people weren't able to gain access to it in a regular and predictable way, and the sheer fact that all over the country, every different campaign and trusted volunteer was able to use a robust web interface with savable queries and the most intuitive interface I have ever seen meant that these data were able to be deployed with massive payoff with little cost.  This was pure gravy. Hats off to Jim and the team at The Voter Activation Network for developing this amazing tool.

So, we all know that the 50 State Strategy put Democratic boots on the ground everywhere, and a message to the GOP that there was no place in the country where they were safe, and that no matter how much were were ridiculed for even trying, we were going to have people knocking on doors, making phone calls and doing the hard work it takes in the reddest of red states. And boy, was there a payoff.  For all the hooting and hollering that Dean took from the press, Republicans and establishment Democrats, no one was laughing when we took the Alaska Senate Seat, and forced the GOP to fight hard in Idaho. 

Yes, I am the first to concede that the Obama campaign was impressive and amazing, but it wasn't unprecedented.  They were able to accomplish a lot becuase of the groundwork that Dean's run for the nomination in 2004 and Dean's tenure at the DNC accomplished.  Their massive operations were powered by DNC data, and there's no getting around it.  Without the voter file team at the DNC, the Obama campaign would have been nowhere.

There are those of us who get it. Whether or not you're a data geek who keeps a nerdy blog about it like we do, you get it. You know what Dean's done for the party, and you know that he was our fighting spirit at a time when Democrats were racing each other to bend over backwards to accomodate the GOP.  And now, even after everything he's done for us, Governor Dean is without a job.  Granted, tradition has it that when we win an election, the President-Elect gets to appoint the new Chairman. And really, it wouldn't have been unprecedented for Obama to re-appoint Dean to Chair the DNC.  I'm not sure if any former Chairman has gone on to an Administration job, but it wouldn't have been a bad idea to put a fighter like Dean at HHS instead of a vacillator like Daschle. (Yes, I understand that Daschle's knowledge of the networks of poweris a good argument for putting him there. He's just spineless.) 

And so, for lack of gratitude from the party establishment whom he's returned to power, Governor Dean is without a job in a few months.  He can go back to Vermont and write books, or maybe be a commentator for a media establishment, but the man who built back our party now lacks a job in our party.

Better minds than mine have struggled with this, but I don't know where to put Dean. Who's got ideas?

DD