Howard Dean's Staff: Picking their noses in Utah?
That's not me talking, it's Paul Begala. Let's just say the establishment Democrats, no fans of Howard Dean, are really unhappy now.
This Sunday's New York Times Magazine looks at Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, which is driving short-term strategy loving Democrats nuts.
Excerpt:For [Sen. Chuck] Schumer, [Rep. Rahm] Emanuel and their allies, this rejection [of their request for money] was irritating enough. When they heard the stories of how Dean was actually spending the party’s cash, however, it was almost more than they could take. Dean was paying for four organizers in Mississippi, where there wasn’t a single close House race, but he had sent only three new hires to Pennsylvania, which had a governor’s race, a Senate campaign and four competitive House races. Emanuel said he was all for expanding the party’s reach into rural states — roughly half the House seats he was targeting were in states like Texas, Indiana and Kentucky, after all — but he wanted the D.N.C. to focus on individual districts that Democrats could actually win, as opposed to just spreading money around aimlessly. The D.N.C. was spending its money not only in Alaska and Hawaii, but in the U.S. Virgin Islands as well. Democratic insiders began to rail against this wacky and expensive 50-state plan. "He says it's a long-term strategy," Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said during an appearance on CNN in May. "What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."
