Daniela Schmid Schmid itibaren Kottur, Tamil Nadu 622404, Hindistan
It's a good history of Dean's fifty state strategy and how it was implemented. I gained some persepective on how insular the Democratic party has been in the past and is currently. I learned some unflattering things about people I admired and had my negative opinion of certain other people reinforced. It felt like a depressing read in part because there was a sense of opportunity wasted. As a book about the future of the party it left a lot to be desired. At the end I was left feeling like it was a good history lesson but the book lacked any real analysis of the effectiveness of the strategy as far as governance is concerned. (It's clearly effective as a purely electoral strategy). Berman does ask Dean about the reprecussions of electing Democrats who actually vote against most tradionally Democratic positions but Dean just says that it was important to win first and now he might trade 5 non traditional Democrats for 5 Republicans (as one supporter points out, a Republican in office can motiviate voters. A Democrat in office who votes like a Republican just depresses voters). There's no real examination of what it means to elect Democrats who don't take traditional Democratic positions. This is especially problematic in light of the fact that the current political climate requires a supermajority in the Senate to get anything done. If the years since President Obama's election have taught us anything it's that Senate Minority Leader is the most powerful position in government. Arguably the Democrats would have been better off if they'd been in the minority in the Senate. I think there's also an argument to be made about whether Dean's strategy simply wasn't given enough time to produce results. Maybe some of the people who were elected at a local level will eventually be elected to a federal position and take traditional Democratic positions. Unoforunately, Berman makes it pretty clear that after Obama's election and Dean's term was over the fifty state strategy was largely abandoned so we may never know how effective it might have been in future years. In the end I'm left with the feeling that the fifty state stategy was a flash in the pan, its effectiveness as a governing strategy still untested. As a non-wealthy self-identified Liberal in a blue state I'm left feeling that I never had a place in the Democratic party and unfortunately I still don't.