WASHINGTON: As almost everyone in at least two hemispheres knows, next week’s Democratic party convention will be the most important four days so far in the life of Barack Obama. Having just barely regained some footing after two disastrous weeks in which he took a beach holiday while enduring a barrage of Republican attacks and saw his lead over John McCain vaporise, Obama arrives in Denver with his future on the line.

But another prominent figure has a lot at stake, too. For Howard Dean, the Democratic party chairman who will oversee the proceedings in the Rocky mountain city, it’s not so much about his own future, but his party’s future and his legacy as a political leader.

In his three and a half years on the job, Dean has dramatically departed from the traditional role of a US party chairman. Despite the lofty title, historically the chairman has been a glorified bursar. Their job has been to raise money, placate the donors and otherwise keep a low profile.

But Dean has done it differently. He has been a mediocre fundraiser. What he has tried to do instead is transform the thinking inside the party. And he’s done better at that than many sceptics would ever have thought.

“I hope we’ve changed the way we do Democratic politics in this country,” Dean told this reporter. “And I think it will lead to the election of Barack Obama as president.” If it does, Dean will have to go down as one of the most innovative and successful Democratic chairmen of the last 50 years.

The 59-year-old’s journey has been an improbable one. He grew up in a Republican family in the poshest of posh surroundings – New York City’s upper east side and the Hamptons. He went to Yale, famously requesting, in his first year, that he be assigned to live with a black roommate. His medical training took him to Vermont where, in 1980, he led a successful campaign to halt the construction of a condominium building (he wanted a bicycle trail).

He entered politics and, like so many before and after him, got the bug. He became the state’s lieutenant governor, cutting ribbons and attending funerals. But then, in 1991, the governor died. Suddenly Dean was one of 50 elite politicians in the US.He was a moderate and even penny-pinching governor, not considered a liberal at all. But as he watched the country’s radical swing to the right under George Bush, he inched left. The story from there is more familiar. The failed presidential campaign. The infamous Iowa scream, which haunts him still on late-night talk shows. The penchant for deeply impolitic statements (“I hate the Republicans”). The emergence, due to conservatives’ repetition, of his name as a synonym for elitist, latte-sipping, gay-loving, America-bashing liberalism.

Those attacks endeared him to the party’s core constituencies. After John Kerry lost to Bush in 2004, the time came to select a new party chairman. Dean was one of seven candidates. The big party leaders –Senate majority leader Harry Reid, House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi and others – were mortified at the prospect of this radioactive presence becoming the titular leader of their party.

But there was nothing they could do about it. The party chairman is chosen by national committee members – party activists spread across the country. These people, livid at their leadership for blowing another election with their pusillanimity and caution, loved Dean’s in-your-face, partisan style. In February 2005, they made him chairman.

The pre-Dean practice in the party had been built on two foundations. First, that electing a president is really all that mattered (as opposed to, say, building the party at grassroots level). Second, that the way to elect a president is concentrate on a handful of “swing states,” such as Ohio, Florida and Michigan, not worry about states that were already Democratic, such as New York, and write off all the Republican states.

That is what Dean changed. He implemented his now-famous “50-state strategy”. Hiring party organisers in every state, even ruby-red Oklahoma and Alabama. Paying them actual salaries, even. Spending money not just to win the election but to build a national infrastructure that could bear fruit into the next generation, or two. Does it seem obvious? Well, no one thought of it before.

Three years on, Dean feels justified – for now. Asked whether his strategy will receive the ultimate vindication of electing a president, he said: “I think it remains to be seen. But so far I feel my approach has been the right one. We have a congressional majority in some large proportions in the House, and I think we’re going to certainly gain in the Senate. And where we’re going to gain in the Senate is places like Virginia and Alaska and Colorado and New Mexico [all states that voted for Bush in 2004]. That’s essentially expanding the playing field, which is what this is all about.”

He has made important converts. “As many people know, Governor Dean was not my first choice to become head of the DNC, nor was he necessarily my second choice,” said Harry Reid. “But the success of his 50-state strategy has made a big believer out of me.” Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Nancy Pelosi, said: “The 50-state strategy has helped bring more people into the process. Democrats from Barack Obama to House candidates across the country are competing in even bright red states. This will be a great Democratic year.”

Not everyone is a believer. There is a certain family, rather prominent in Democratic politics, that is known never to have liked Dean. The female head of that household has millions of passionate followers, and many of them think Howard Dean rigged the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. They point especially to hotly disputed votes from Florida and Michigan, states Clinton won but which saw their vote allocation cut in half by an official party committee because they violated party rules about when to hold their primaries.

The charge doesn’t hold water – party chairmen used to dictate outcomes like that in the era of the smoke-filled room, but those days are gone. Still, some Clintonistas thumb their collective nose at pleas for unity, calling themselves PUMAs (party unity, my ass), and 18-25% of them, according to polls, say they’re voting for John McCain.Dean insists he has worked assiduously to appease them. “I truly believe that we are much more unified than the media is writing about because of their tendency to focus on the nail that sticks up rather than what’s really going on,” he said.

One very important Clinton backer sounded only partially pacified. Alan Patricof, one of Clinton’s most prominent finance staff, said Dean “has tried very hard to keep things smooth”. But he added: “A different person with closer relationships with some people might have been able to push people around. Howard wasn’t able to push people around.”

Dean says, “I’m a huge fan of Hillary’s and always have been.” Whether the feeling is mutual is at the very least open to question. But if Barack Obama is elected president, what will it matter?

As Dean knows, for all his successes at the state and local levels, a party chairman’s legacy comes down to one question: did the party elect a president on his watch? Dean remains confident about Obama’s chances, and he likes the way the nominee has embraced the Dean strategy of expanding the map, fighting for votes in states such as Indiana and North Carolina, where Democrats haven’t even tried for years. Dean sees his legacy as being about both Obama and that expansion.

“I’m not the one to judge myself,” he said. “My own view is this party desperately needed to be shaken up and turned around. And we’ve done that. I believe we’re going to win the presidency. But I don’t think we’re going to go back to the old days of trying to eke out a victory by six electoral votes and focus on just 20 states. I don’t think we’re going to go back to that model anymore.”

The fact that next week’s convention is in Denver, a red state in what is sometimes called “flyover country”, makes that clear. The party has changed. But now, the changeneeds to result in a win.—Dawn/Guardian News Service