“Is Howard Dean willing to destroy the Democratic Party in order to save it?” (UPDATED)

UPDATE: Here's the full article.

Editor&Publisher:

An article in this coming Sunday’s edition of The New York Times Magazine profiles Howard Dean’s efforts to establish the new “50 state strategy” for the Democratic National Committee, which he now heads – a move which has brought him into fierce combat with some leaders in his own party.

The often critical cover story by Matt Bai is titled: “Is Howard Dean willing to destroy the Democratic Party in order to save it?”

Bai tags along with Dean on a trip to check out the party setup in, of all places, Alaska, then writes, “In just a few hours, Dean had nicely demonstrated why so many leading Democrats in Washington wish he would spend even more time in Alaska – preferably hiking the tundra for a few months without a cell phone.”

Repeatedly the story returns to Dean’s battle with Rep. Rahm Emanuel. The latter favors the usual practice of funneling more national money to battleground states, while Dean wants to spread it around – with key elections coming in November. “I’m not going to be on his holiday mailing list, and he’s not going to be on my holiday mailing list,” Emanuel tells Bai. “But this isn’t about him or me.”

If the Democrats narrowly miss taking over Congress, Bai writes, party leaders will blame Dean and “say that he squandered their best chance” for a comeback in years.
Bai also relates: “Now, at power lunches and private meetings, perplexed Washington Democrats, the kind of people who have lorded over the party apparatus for decades, find themselves pondering the same bewildering questions. What on earth can Howard Dean be thinking? Does he really care about winning in November, or is he after something else?” Bai is skeptical, however, of one theory that has Dean presiding over another failed Democratic run for the White House in 2008, setting him up for his own “grassroots” run in 2012.

The article does give the former Vermont governor his say, and suggests the party, indeed, needs a new outlook, even if Dean is not “the best messenger” to deliver it. Dean declares, “The risk of doing nothing, the same old thing is enormous.”

But the story also contains numerous digs at Dean and his image, noting that while he has many activist fans, “for the rest of the country, Dean is that lefty who howled on national TV. Some Democratic governors and candidates have avoided Dean when he has been in town, for fear that their opponents would portray them as extremists.”

And: “Fairly or not, Dean has come to embody a species of Democrat that a lot of Americans of both parties find off-putting the 60‘s antiwar liberal, reborn with a laptop and a Prius.”