Dean (though, Any Excuse Will Do...)
First, a confession: I'm largely entering this post because I finally got my high-speed connection working--thanks to a newly installed AirPort which was the Tekserve-suggested workaround for my busted Ethernet connection. At last, at last, at last... Annie gets the phone line and I don't have to spend half my time here waiting for the spinning rainbow circle to resolve into a web page. Glory be.

Reason #2, of course, is that I haven't posted much of anything over the last two weeks, and now I don't even have the excuse of matrimony. And while the Phillies are 10-1 since I tied the knot, I don't want to write about them here out of the usual superstitious fears. Not that I'm a causal factor or anything. But just in case Spinoza was right, why rock the boat.

So that leaves us with this Yahoo! story I just found, and the encouraging news it bears:

Democratic National Committee leaders embraced feisty party boss Howard Dean on Saturday and urged him to keep fighting despite a flap over his blunt comments on Republicans.

After a meeting of the DNC's 40-member executive committee at a downtown hotel, members said Dean was doing exactly what they elected him to do -- build the party in all states and aggressively challenge Republicans.

"I hope Governor Dean will remember that he didn't get elected to be a wimp," said DNC member Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a South Carolina state representative. "We have been waiting a long time for someone to stand up for Democrats."

...in a series of interviews DNC members backed the former Vermont governor, known for his fiery rhetoric during his failed 2004 White House run, and said they knew what they were getting when they elected him in February as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

"Howard Dean is going to be much more aggressive, much more outspoken and much more of a risk-taker outside the Beltway than any chairman has been. We knew that," said Alvaro Cifuentes, chairman of the DNC Hispanic caucus.
...
"We have to get our politics out of Washington. We cannot continue to be held captive by party leaders who I respect but who have to play their own local politics," Cifuentes said, calling congressional Democrats "timid" and the flap over his comments "mostly a Beltway play."
Karen Marchioro, a DNC member from Washington state, said she was stunned to see so many congressional Democrats back away from Dean.

"We always defend them, why won't they defend us? And they want us to support them for president?" she asked. "I have no desire to lose, I just think this is the way you win -- you let people know where you stand and you fight."

Cobb-Hunter said Dean "should consider the source -- congressional Democrats. What's their track record? He's doing what a lot of us wanted him to do and expected him to do."

After all the trimming and difference-splitting from national Democrats over Dean's remarks the last week or two, it's good to see that the chairman's fighting spirit is receiving a better hearing outside DC. As you'd expect, the activists on Daily Kos are solidly behind him. Like it or not--and I think Dean can retain his sharp partisan edge while being a bit more careful with his specific wording--Dean got this job in part to raise Democratic spirits after years of the same kind of jumping at shadows we're seeing from Washington-based Dems now. And make no mistake about it: his election to the post of DNC chair was also in no small part a loud "fuck you" to those same cringing Democrats. Whether or not he can effectively manage the transition to "Democratic Party 2.0," fusing an alliance of educated managerial and professional-class workers with the more working-class group once known as Reagan Democrats, will determine just how restive the Bidens, Pelosis and their ilk will get with him; in the end, nothing succeeds like success. But in a political context that never seems to reward prudence, nuance or compromise, Dean's blunt speech deserves support from his co-partisans.