Union sources said that Frost appeared to have the upper hand on Dean but that if Dean appears too strong to stop, the labor movement would be unlikely to expend capital to defeat him and would not want to back a candidate, such as Frost, in the process.
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.
...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.
...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."
... With Roemer, Webb and Leland seemingly far from the front, Fowler and Rosenberg appear to be in the best position to prevail if anti-Dean voters keep Dean from winning and Frost fails to win over enough "anybody but Dean" voters. Fowler and Rosenberg are both young, and they both argue that they're best-of-both-worlds alternatives to Dean and Frost. "What you get with me is a proven track record of winning in red states and the proven history of working with grass roots and 'net roots,'" Rosenberg said. Not surprisingly, there's a fair amount of sniping between Fowler and Rosenberg camps. Rosenberg's aides grumble that Fowler is running on the coattails of his father, former DNC chairman Don Fowler. Fowler, in turn, dismisses Rosenberg as an articulate guy who is "winning the chattering classes in San Francisco and New York" but not making much progress with voting members of the Democratic National Committee.
Fowler and Rosenberg both talk a good game about being first-tier candidates, but their real job now is to build enough support to make sure they survive the first ballot -- in each round of voting on Feb. 12, the candidate with the least votes drops out -- and then to make sure that they're the second or third choice of a whole lot of DNC voters. "Howard Dean can't win if he doesn't win outright on the first ballot," Rosenberg says.
When Webb drops, I would expect virtually all of his supporters to jump to Dean. So Dean could easily fall short on the first ballot but win once you add in the Colorado and African-American delegates who prefer to show their support for Webb on the first ballot.
Since Webb endorsed Dean for President, I wouldn't at all be surprised if he endorsed Dean for DNC after he is eliminated. If it goes past the first ballot, I would expect the order of elimination to be:
Leland Roemer Webb
Also, since the voting process is to drop the lowest candidate each round, who's to say that some of Rosenberg and Fowler's supporters -- in theory people who want reform -- wouldn't vote for Dean once their guy is out?
uh, but it didn't work. he lost. and as anna has shown, it probably hurt dems in downticket races.
