Eye on the future

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 | 7:20 a.m.

President Bush won 78 percent of the vote in Elko County in 2004, 76 percent in Esmeralda County and 77 percent of Eureka County. Small counties all, but Bush's dominance in rural Nevada was a big reason he won the state's five electoral votes.

After the 2004 election, new Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean promised to stop the party's slide toward geographic isolation - in the cities and inner-ring suburbs.

Dean, in Nevada on Tuesday for public events and a fundraiser, created what he called a "50-state strategy." Democrats would try to compete everywhere by hiring field operatives in deeply red states such as Mississippi and Utah and sending workers into rural counties such as Elko and Esmeralda.

The ambitious strategy pitted Dean and his grass-roots devotees against some Beltway Democrats, including Nevada Sen. Harry Reid. Some Washington Democrats think party money ought to be targeted on the few races that could give Democrats a better chance of taking back the House or Senate - or both.

There have been reports this spring of tense questions about where all the money is going. The party has raised at least $75 million since January 2005, but only had $10 million on hand at the time of filing its last quarterly report.

Paul Begala, the longtime Democratic operative and one-time adviser to President Bill Clinton, put it this way on CNN: "What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."

But if appearances with Reid are any indication, Dean seems to have won the argument and made peace, as the two joked with each other at a veterans' event before heading to a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at a private home.

At issue are the party's House and Senate campaign committees. Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., want Dean to shift some of the money he has raised to those committees.

Dean has resisted.

"They get to spend the money they raise; I get to spend the money I raise," Dean said in an interview Tuesday, adding that the goal is to win House and Senate seats.

Recipients of the Dean money, not surprisingly, rave about his strategy.

Todd Taylor, longtime executive director of the Democratic Party in Utah, said the national party's cash infusion has doubled his staff. There has been record attendance at local, county and state meetings, owing to better organization and communications, he said.

His optimism, however, is tempered by simple reality: Bush won 71 percent of the vote in Utah in 2004.

The question, he says, is whether the Dean strategy will develop a stable of candidates, activists and volunteers who can make the party viable again in Utah.

"I have every reason to believe it will," Taylor said.

Many Democrats in Washington, however, are thinking about November, and worry that Republicans will make a massive media push in the fall to help vulnerable incumbents.

The Democratic grass roots - including many who helped make Dean chairman - are unmoved by that argument.

Dean's "job isn't to win elections in 2006. As head of the Democratic National Committee, his job is to build a national party," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs the widely read liberal blog, DailyKos, and who recently co-wrote a book about liberal activism, "Crashing the Gate."

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said there isn't an obvious answer for Democrats: "They're both right. They're both wrong. That's why it's a legitimate dispute ...

"The only way for the Democratic Party to recover is to become competitive in more places in the future. But, of course, people who are running the 2006 races want the limited resources spent in this election here and now, and they'll let the races 20 years from now take care of themselves.

"Are you a long-distance runner or a sprinter? It depends on your point of view."