Dean's December

That's the title of an article on the Weekly Standard website by Jonathan Last. Basically it goes over in detail what's next for the brash former Vermont governor. It mentions how Dean fails to mention John Kerry in his speeches and on Dean's website.

It remains to be seen what kind of political future Dean has inside the Democratic party. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, if Dean does succeed in becoming the new chair of the Democratic party, it could spell the end of the Democratic Party as we know it. The article does mention:

The Dean plan, then, is to flood the Democratic party apparatus with Dean-supporting progressives at the local level, and then wrest control from the more centrist national Democratic establishment.

Normally that would mean that this would be good news for federalists like me who would like to see one party go towards setting up the idea of federalism in the United States again. But on the other hand, the article mentions

He says that Democrats must become a "50-state party" again, and must fight for every vote in every county. "There are no red states or blue states," he said, because people in "red" states are actually "hungry for new ideas."

So basically, the "progressive" Dean wants to fight for votes in every state, including the south. This would contrast with the ideas of some other "progressives" who would like for nothing better than to ignore the red states and focus on strengthening the Democrats power in the blue states.

The only problem I could see with this is that it will cause a divide between the Republicans and the Democrats on the issue of federalism. If Democrats continue down the path of wanting more local control because that's all that the Democrats can get at this point, then that means that the Republicans will be more likely to be supportive of centralizing power at the federal level. Unless the Republicans take the issue away from Democrats and then really marginalize the liberals. Then again, this comes down to whether there can be support for strict constrictionists for the nations courts. I doubt that there will be the chance for strict constrictionists, no matter how the Democrats might be leaning toward consolidating power in the blue states.