Editorial: Cultivating grass roots

Monday, June 5, 2006 | 7:18 a.m.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is promoting a "50-state strategy" in hopes of bolstering Democratic candidates from the grass roots up.

During his visit to Las Vegas last week, Dean told the Las Vegas Sun that his strategy is to bolster the Democratic Party at the grass-roots level by hiring field workers to go to communities in red, i.e. Republican-won, areas such as Utah and Mississippi and rural parts of Nevada.

It's a strategy Dean first launched in 2003 in his effort to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The goal, he told The Boston Globe at the time, wasn't so much to win the nomination but to build up the Democratic Party enough to defeat President Bush's re-election.

Obviously, that didn't happen. And some longtime Democratic leaders and political advisers aren't exactly thrilled with the plan for which Dean is raising and spending a lot of money. Paul Begala, one-time adviser to President Bill Clinton, told CNN that Dean "is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose." That's hardly the way to win the hearts - and votes - of people in those areas.

Rather than treating these communities as lost causes, Dean hopes to win them over by giving them better access to the political process and true choices among candidates. Bush's gigantic budget deficit, funding cuts to programs for the poor and tax breaks for big businesses and the nation's wealthiest citizens aren't in the best interests of average Americans, many of whom live in rural areas that the Democrats, in particular, have overlooked. These voters just might make a different choice if given one.

While it is the national committee's job to focus on congressional wins for the short term, the party also needs to aggressively pursue voters who don't live in the big cities or the blue states. Reconnecting them could provide the political jolt that the Democrats need.

Although Dean's plan is designed to help his party, the effort could lay the foundation for a different kind of political win, as hopefully red states no longer are taken for granted by Republicans. In that way, both Republican and Democratic voters gain better access to the political process no matter where they live.