Wednesday, March 2, 2005 | 8:52 a.m.
Freshly minted Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean believes his party can win Nevada and other swing states in the 2008 presidential election by improving grass-roots campaigning and honing its own message.
In a press conference Tuesday at Bally's, the former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont governor said Republicans did a better job of getting out the vote last November in the swing states. Nevada, which was won by Republican President Bush over Democrat John Kerry, was one of those states.
"I hope that by the 2008 presidential campaign we'll have people from Nevada talk to their neighbors in Nevada, asking them to vote Democratic and talking to them about the enormous disaster that the president attempted with Social Security," Dean said.
"He's leaving $2 trillion of additional debt to our children while saying Social Security should be managed by the same people who gave us Enron, Tyco and MCI."
Dean was at the resort to speak at the AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting, a three-day event that wraps up on Thursday.
One reason Bush won election in 2000 and 2004 was that the Democratic Party allowed itself to be defined by the Republican Party, he said.
"We need to stop being defensive about the things we believe in," Dean said of Democrats. "The best defense is a great offense. We need to attack the Republicans where they are weak, which is in practically every area of public policy that there is.
"Certainly they can't manage money. They ran up a huge deficit. They're sending our jobs off shore. They've attacked labor everywhere they could. They've pushed back wages."
Although Kerry carried Clark County, Bush trounced him in Nevada's rural counties. Dean said Democrats can do better in the rural counties, relating the story of a rural Missouri woman who built up her county Democratic Party from three members in her kitchen to 250 who now show up for monthly meetings.
"There's not one county in America with no Democrats, not one," Dean said. "We've got to make these folks proud to be Democrats.
"I understand that we're not going to win in the rural areas of Nevada but you know what? If we increase our percentages from 35 to 45 in the rural areas of Nevada, Nevada is a blue (Democratic) state."
Democrats can win Nevada again in a presidential election because they have done so in the past, Dean said. He mentioned Democrat Bill Clinton's victory in Nevada in 1996, neglecting to note that the former president also carried the state in 1992.
"Nevada is a state we can win," Dean said. "We have won here in the past and we expect we can win in the future."
All six of Nevada's state constitutional offices -- governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer and controller -- are held by Republicans. But Dean expressed confidence that Democrats could do well in this state in 2006, when all of those offices are up for grabs.
"We want to take those races seriously," he said. "We want to see if we can elect some folks who are compatible with what needs to be done in this country in terms of jobs, health care and education."
Dean spoke of having a close relationship with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. And Dean stressed the need for state Democratic parties to forge closer ties to organized labor to build grassroots support.
"The fate of the Democratic Party and the fate of labor are intertwined," Dean said. "Our party has always been the party of working Americans. When labor was successful middle class lifestyles were better than they are today."
Dean said one way to build grassroots support is for Democrats to back state ballot initiatives to boost the minimum wage. Nevadans in November approved a proposed constitutional amendment that, if approved again in 2006, would increase the minimum wage in this state from $5.15 an hour to $6.15 an hour for some employees.
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