Dean's Band of Outsiders

The secret of Dean's success has been twofold. Alone among the serious Democratic candidates he understood that the party was shirking its obligation to oppose -- indeed, that the grass roots was furious at the failure of its leaders to realize this. Second, his campaign became the real Meetup for millions of Americans who'd had no place to go to affect politics in the age of Bush. Dean's edge is that his campaign has provided thousands of young Deaniacs with a dimension of meaning that their hitherto disaggregated lives may have lacked. No other candidate is within light-years of offering that.

In a sense, Al Gore's decision to endorse Dean is emblematic of the growing realization of the party's establishmentarians that they're outsiders after all. But Gore's been on this path for some time now. He was, we should remember, the first major Democrat to oppose Bush's war, speaking out against it in August 2002. Since losing the presidential race at the Supreme Court, he's also called for single-payer health care and recently come out against renewing our new-age version of star chamber justice, the USA Patriot Act.

Gore's old entourage, however, remains, literally and figuratively, on K Street, from where his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, helps steer the insider-dominated Wesley Clark campaign. There are no outsiders on K Street; it's where Democrats go when they want to make deals even when they're otherwise on the outs. Gore clearly has decided that K Street's not for him, and so much the better for Gore.

Can a band of outsiders beat George W. Bush? Clearly, the congressional wing of the Democrats can only benefit from embracing its outsider status, but is the same true for the aspiring presidential wing? There are limits to the Meetup approach to building a presidential majority, but no one's ever tried it before, and we don't know what those limits are.
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