Dean's 50 State Strategy Looking Smart Now

Howard Dean was urged to concentrate on a few seats that could be picked up but he said it was time for the Democrats to rebuild the party. No one knows what's going to happen on Nov. 7th since there's always that small detail that people have to show up and they have to vote. And then there's that other detail that negative campaigns tend to lower voter turnout and this always favors Republicans and of course the Republicans, who have no issues to run on that resonate with a majority of Americans, know all well the value of negative campaigns.

But it's becoming increasingly obvious to a majority of Americans that Republicans in Washington aren't doing much for our country and that things are getting bad in Iraq and there are right wing Republicans eagerly trying to do things such as privatize social security, and, well the list just goes on. Here's a story from The Los Angeles Times that suggests that Howard Dean was on the right track, that there are more seats in play than Democrats thought possible, and just maybe the Democrats might take a house:

A growing number of GOP incumbents in seats once considered "safe" — including Melissa A. Hart in Pennsylvania, Ron Lewis in Kentucky, Richard W. Pombo in Tracy, Calif., and Gutknecht here — are struggling this month against a powerful current of discontent with the nation's direction, the performance of Congress and President Bush, and the war in Iraq.

Republican seats at risk have nearly tripled since January, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Then, 18 GOP seats were endangered; now, 48 are considered in play.

(snip)

To take back the House, which they lost in 1994, Democrats need a net gain of 15 seats — something they could do, perhaps, without capturing any of these newly competitive seats. But Democratic strategists believe that if the party can break into this second tier of Republican-leaning districts, they could greatly increase their odds of building a majority large enough to survive for longer than two years.

In a measure of the party's growing optimism, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to announce Tuesday that it will begin airing advertisements in 11 new districts, including eight the party had not considered competitive until recently, party sources say.

(snip)

...in elections characterized by a strong desire for change, such as 1974 and 1994, the current of discontent was powerful enough to sweep in even underfunded challengers. And whatever happens Nov. 7, it is already clear that Democrats have generated intense pressure on many Republicans who have not needed to run full-scale campaigns for years — and did not expect to do so now.

I'm convinced that it's going to take another election cycle or two to turn things around. We're in an age where it's taking longer for a majority of Americans to catch up to what's going on in the world and to see past the hype and spin that effectively covers up failure and incompetence and to see the problems that our children will be facing if we don't start dealing with those problems now in an intelligent way.

The truth is that things are changing rapidly and we need a functional government in Washington. Maybe, just maybe, a majority of the American voters are turning to the Democrats this year knowing that we need change, that we need to start moving forward again, that we need to take on the new problems of our age with new ideas instead of falling back on the failed policies of the past. There's no courage and not much of a future in a Republican Congress that rubber stamps Bush. Instead of huddling in fear, as Bush and his friends seem to want, maybe Americans will stand up and demand their future back.