Somehow, at the end of the day, Dean managed to triumph over his rivals after all. Lashing out at Washington Democrats as timid and feckless during the primaries, he vowed to ''take back our party,'' and he did exactly that. The party's Congressional leaders could talk all they wanted about how Dean would be a mere functionary -- ''I think Dean knows his job is not to set the message,'' Harry Reid lectured -- but, like Kerry's welcoming e-mail message, such statements had the ring of self-delusion. The moment the votes for chairman were counted, Howard Dean became the de facto voice of the Democratic Party. ...
Inevitably, Dean's ascension has been seen in the familiar Democratic context of center versus left, New Democrat versus old. Dean, it has been said, is too far left to lead a party that suffers from an image of extremism. But what Dean's selection actually makes clear is that these distinctions have less meaning in today's party than ever before. While Dean was a leftist, antiwar presidential candidate, he was also, as he never tired of reminding people, a defiantly centrist governor of Vermont. (Early in the presidential race, Dean told me, ''I was a triangulator before Clinton was a triangulator.'') Dean opposed the invasion of Iraq, but his rhetoric about winning the peace and fighting terrorists at home hardly contrasts with anything that supposedly moderate Democrats espouse. Dean likes to be described as ''pro-gun,'' but his actual positions are indistinguishable in every way from those of Democrats who favor stricter gun control.
In this way, Dean perfectly embodies the modern Democratic Party, whose ideology feels so muddled and incohesive that labels of ''left'' and ''center,'' at least in terms of governing philosophy, are almost irrelevant.
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