Real health care reform that includes a new public health insurance option would give Americans a real choice and not reward for-profit health insurers with 47 milllion new customers. Real health care reform that includes a new public health insurance option would cut out the administrative waste of private insurers and begin changing the way health care is delivered. Real health care reform that includes a new public health insurance option could adopt the kind of payment reforms that would start to “hold down long-term growth in health spending” and encourage providers to deliver care more efficiently. We know that premiums in the public option would be about 10 percent lower and that a real robust plan that piggy backs off of Medicare’s infrastructure could save us somewhere between $75 billion and $150 billion over 10 years.

As Howard Dean prepares to step down as DNC Chairman, its worth remembering that when he started the right and much of the decaying party establishment insisted that his tenure would be counted in days or weeks, certainly not months. Democrats were in disarray, coming off a losing presidential election and consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet Howard Dean thought the party had to expand, not contract, and show up in our elections from coast to coast.

Howard Dean leaves a Democratic party in a historic moment of strength. Fundraising has been strong, no longer beholden to a few fat cats but instead reliant on individuals. The Dean-led Democratic party took back control of the Senate (with a majority just a few votes short of a filibuster proof majority), took control of the House of Representatives, and of course took a historic leap forward with a landslide in the Presidential race to elect Barack Obama the 44th president.

Thanks to Howard Dean, the state of our party is STRONG.

Picture via Natalie Maynor

You’re not going to always win these fights. Most of the time you will lose. But for the love of God, just show up.

Who knew that the RNC would bust out the wahmbulance so soon in the 2008 campaign. And they’re going straight to legal maneuvers to squelch the ad. Funny how the party of “tort reform” always jumps to the lawyers.

The ad hits a nerve. And I hope it keeps doing so (I gave to the DNC for the first time in years in response to it).

The committee’s chief counsel, Sean Cairncross, said he sent letters Monday to NBC, CNN and MSNBC insisting that they stop airing the commercial.

At issue is McCain’s answer, in January, to a question about Bush’s theory that troops could be in Iraq for 50 years.

McCain said: “Maybe 100. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’d be fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaida is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”

Democratic Party chief Howard Dean said “there’s nothing false” about the ad.

“We deliberately used John McCain’s words. This isn’t some ominous consultant’s voice from Washington. This is John McCain’s own words. And we’ve been very upfront about everything that he’s said.”

The RNC wants a new standard for campaign ads: Don’t run ads against Republicans if you’re going to use their actual words.

A lot of these people wish for the days of Ron Brown and Terry McAuliffe, where the party chairmanship was essentially an outgrowth of the Clinton family. Which, as noted time and again, was a good arrangement for the Clintons but pretty much the suck for Democratic candidates, right up until John Kerry.

Howard Dean’s job is to keep the party running at a steady clip while making the Democrats a truly national party again. That’s what he’s doing.

Then Dean wanted to know how many organizers the state party now had on the ground, and Teeters told him there was just one: Teeters himself. The D.N.C. created his job — along with a position for a communications director — last year as part of Dean’s signature program, known as the 50-state strategy. Under this program, the national party is paying for hundreds of new organizers and press aides for the state parties, many of which have been operating on the edge of insolvency. The idea is to hire mostly young, ambitious activists who will go out and build county and precinct organizations to rival Republican machines in every state in the country. “We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” Dean likes to say. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.”

In paying for two new staffers, Dean had, virtually overnight, doubled the size of Alaska’s beleaguered state party, which used to consist of only an executive director and a part-time fund-raiser. But now, as Dean considered the vastness of the state’s landscape, he decided that one organizer wasn’t enough. “In most states, we have three or four,” Dean said, thinking out loud. “Seems like you should really have more. We should be able to find that money in the budget.”

That night, after meeting with Dean at the sad little storefront office that houses the state party, Alaska’s party chairman, Jake Metcalfe, announced to 400 assembled Democrats at a fund-raiser that Dean had just promised to hire an additional organizer for the state. The ballroom erupted in grateful applause as Dean sat there beaming. The members of his staff, gently rolling their eyes, began calling back to Washington, warning the political staff that they would need to find the money for yet another salary in, of all places, Alaska.