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Two very different politicians are leading the race for the DNC chair, but neither has the contest clinched -- and others are closing in. Where is the Democratic Party going?
Jan 28, 2005 | The two leading candidates to head the Democratic National Committee are a former congressman who cozied up to George W. Bush in his last run for reelection -- and still lost -- and a failed presidential candidate who so frightens some conservative Democrats that they may go Republican if he is elected chairman.
Who says that the Democratic Party is in trouble?
As Democrats struggle to make sense of what happened in 2004 -- as they find themselves divided over whether to support Bush nominees like Condoleezza Rice and floating trial balloons about compromise on core Democratic issues like abortion -- the 447 voting members of the Democratic National Committee are in the process of choosing their party's new chairman. In a sense, the vote comes too early; with no clear consensus on where the party should be going, it's hard to know what kind of leader it's going to need. But the DNC will meet in Washington to vote on Feb. 12, and at the moment, the race is led by two men who -- fairly or not -- are seen as offering starkly different visions of the party's future.
In former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, progressive Democrats see a charismatic outsider who can revolutionize the party by drawing on the grass roots and "net roots" support that drove his presidential campaign. In former Texas Rep. Martin Frost, moderate and conservative Democrats see an experienced Washington hand who helped the party pick up congressional seats even in the dark days of Newt Gingrich's "Contract for America."
Neither Dean nor Frost has yet clinched the 224 votes needed to win the chairmanship, and it's not clear that either can get there. Dean's support may max out far short of 224 -- there are "a lot of Washington insiders worried about losing their meal ticket," a veteran Democratic strategist told Salon this week -- and Frost may not be able to win over reform-minded DNC members currently loyal to Dean. That leaves room for a consensus to emerge around lesser known candidates -- New Democrat Network president Simon Rosenberg or Democratic strategist Donnie Fowler -- if neither Dean nor Frost wins on the first ballot.
The other candidates in the race seem less able to capitalize on a Dean-Frost split. Former Ohio state party chairman David Leland has been a nonfactor. Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb has picked up some public endorsements but appears to have little room to build on them. And former Indiana Rep. and 9/11 commissioner Tim Roemer, who, made a splash early in the race with a report that he had the support of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, has seen his campaign begin to crumble over concerns about his personal opposition to abortion. Pelosi isn't endorsing him, and her spokeswoman insists that she never did -- that she only "encouraged" him to "get in the race" because of his credibility on national security issues.
Rosenberg said this week that the race remains "wide open," at least for the upper-tier candidates, and that support is "soft" for all of them. Aides to several candidates have expressed surprise that, as early endorsements leak out, Dean isn't closer to nailing down a majority. Fowler says that Frost has little "room to grow" because reformers view him as the anti-Dean. "When I talk to people, they say, 'It's you or Frost, Donnie,' or 'It's you or Dean, Donnie,'" Fowler told Salon earlier this week. "It's never 'Frost or Dean.'"
It may not ultimately be Frost or Dean, but right now it's all Frost or Dean, and that's precisely what has so many Democrats in so much despair. The Dean-friendly blogosphere is unloading on Frost for running a TV commercial during his 2004 campaign in which he seemed to align himself with George W. Bush and other Washington Republicans. "Who backed President Bush?" the ad's announcer asked. "Kay Hutchison and Martin Frost . . . Speaker Hastert and Martin Frost . . . John McCain and Martin Frost." Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas, who worked briefly for Dean's presidential campaign, says that Frost's ads make him "grossly unqualified" for the chairmanship. "If you spend a year distancing yourself from the Democratic Party and sucking up to Bush, Hastert and Hutchinson, then you have no business trying to run the Democratic Party," Moulitsas wrote on his blog last week. Rosenberg, one of the candidates Moulitsas is backing in the DNC race, is only a little more equivocal about the ads, calling them "very problematic" for a man who wants to lead the Democratic Party.
Frost and his supporters see it otherwise, of course. "My God, he was running in Texas," says New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, one of a handful of DNC members who have endorsed Frost publicly. Madrid said the ads show only that Frost is a "pragmatist" who "knows what he has to do to win."
Frost didn't win in 2004, but it's hard to blame him for it. Frost was first elected to Congress in 1978, and he won reelection again and again through the 1980s and 1990s, ultimately rising through the party ranks to chair both the Democratic Caucus and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. At the DCCC, Frost says he helped the Democrats pick up 14 seats in the House of Representatives, an experience he has made a centerpiece of his DNC campaign.
Having a Texan in the Democratic leadership didn't sit well with Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. So when the Republicans redrew the congressional district lines for Texas in 2003, DeLay targeted Frost for elimination. He succeeded. After DeLay carved up his old district, Frost was left with little choice but to run for "reelection" in a new, heavily Republican district against a Republican incumbent, Pete Sessions. It was an uphill battle, and a nasty one, too. At one point, Sessions ran a radio ad claiming that Frost had invited a "convicted child molester" to perform at a fundraiser for him. It was a reference to Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, who pled guilty in 1970 to taking "immoral and indecent liberties" with a 14-year-old fan and was pardoned for the crime by Jimmy Carter in 1981.
While it's true that Frost downplayed his party affiliation in his new district -- the word "Democrat" seldom appeared on his campaign materials -- Frost said he ran the TV ad aligning himself with Bush not to show that he agreed with the president, but rather to show that his opponent was so extreme that he didn't. "The point I was making in the ad was that my opponent didn't support the president's homeland security legislation," Frost said. "He was one of only, like, nine people in Congress who voted against it. He was on the lunatic fringe of an issue that everyone agreed was an important issue, and I thought this was a pretty graphic way of showing it."
Tom Eisenhauer, who chairs Frost's DNC campaign, said that the ad may be important to bloggers but has "not been an issue" with DNC members. "I don't see the relevance, really," Eisenhauer said, pointing to the fact that Howard Dean himself said just last week "there are some things we can support the president on." The difference, of course, is that Dean is so thoroughly typecast as a raving, anti-Bush liberal that he can make vaguely conciliatory comments about the president without having anyone doubt his Democratic bona fides. Frost doesn't have that kind of latitude because he doesn't have Dean's reputation or rock-star status as a former presidential candidate.
