Burnt Orange Report

Musical chairs

By Nathan Nance

Guest post by Nate Nance

Jerome over at MyDD is keeping us up to date on the horse race for the DNC chair.

According to him, Dean still has the best chance of winning. Dean has popular support, something relatively unheard of in a race for the chair, and he is the Reform candidate, which is what everyone but the leadership wants. It is most definitely his race to lose, and right now, no news is good news.

The Anybody But Dean vote, if you want to look at it like that, seems to be split between Simon Rosenberg and Donnie Fowler. At this point any kind of reform-minded person would probably be choosing between these three candidates with the lion's share going to Dean. I've mentioned before that I think Rosenberg would make a pretty good chair. Fowler is much the same. But Dean brings an actual sense of outside the Beltway reform that I just don't think Rosenberg can compete with. I think we need to get someone who is not DC to be our spokesman and to be making strategy until the next election cycle. It doesn't hurt that Dean understands netroots activism as well as any of the other reform candidates.

Tim Roemer is something of an enigma to me. I don't understand why he has as much support as he does since he's pretty much an establishment candidate. The DLC says something needs to change, the Deaniacs say something needs to change, why would anyone want the same old same old? Unless of course you're aready in power, which explains why Pelosi and Reid are backing him.

Not so good for the candidates from Texas, either. Martin Frost and Ron Kirk both seem to be nowhere in the race, no real support outside the state and no real platform to stand on. I have to ask, why even bother?

That about sums up the race to date. Dean's way out in front and the DNC ignores him at their own risk. I mean, do you really want thousands upon thousands of Deaniacs to just not give you money? They'll contribute at DFA's site instead, because they think Dean is the man to lead us out of the desert. It's his to lose but I guess we'll see in a month where it goes.

This is a guest post by Nathan Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk at the Waco-Tribune-Herald and writer/editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. He can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com.