Reply #8: This is Telling

[NashVegas]

TODD: There seems to be this fear of Dean and it's among some Washington Democrats, whatever you want to call it. It's why the Tim Roemer candidacy got legs when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the leaders, congressional Democrats pushed that. It's my understanding president Clinton through an intermediary reached out to Wesley Clark in the last couple days to see if he would have any interest in being DNC chair and Clark emphatically said, I want to run for president again. So he didn't want to do that. So there is a movement, but it's not clear if the movement at all is inside the DNC itself. That's sort of the -- that's sort of the missing part here because the "stop Dean" aspect of this whole thing, it's not that people disagree with what Dean wants to do with the party, it's the fear of Dean as the face of the party that some of these folks have and I think Martin Frost and Tim Roemer both are trying to position themselves to be the "stop Dean" or anti-Dean candidate but they have yet -- it's not yet clear whether -- which one it will be.

WOODRUFF: I want to ask you about this event in Atlanta over the weekend -- but what is it that they fear about Dean? TODD: It's more of that Dean already has an image, that Dean has this image of a liberal and that no matter what Democrat running in any state will say, you know, this is the party of Howard Dean and that he has this established image that the Republicans created of him of being this left-wing guy from Vermont that eats Ben & Jerry's rather than a mainstream Democrat.


I refuse to get excited. I'll get excited when it's all been said and done and if Dean is chair.